Every upcoming event of note receives the attention we expect it to warrant. When I think of the hours I devoted to planning my wedding, or preparing for job interviews, hours wasted from from the retrospective view, and then the waiting, the arduous, hopeless torture of helplessly praying for justification for all that effort, when we know quite well that we can align all the details in our favor and completely miss the big picture.
I arranged my independence in a similar fashion. I completed the paperwork almost immediately, converted everything to my name, and started searching for a more affordable singles abode. In the meantime I lined up a friend, also in the process of house hunting, to help share the expense. One day when I mentioned this roommate at work, my flirtatious co-worker, always quick on the uptake said, “Is there a reason why you no longer refer to him as your husband?” I made some brassy remark that revealed my newly single status.
The confidence of instigating and following through with a break-up requires a lot of bravado, a blind charge into the incoming fire. One must sever the heartstrings connected to your head to accomplish this, and that disconnect, while forestalling any hesitation, can also lead to rash decisions. You find yourself discarding valuables like apple cores, and agreeing to invites you might normally ignore because any outings sound like a welcome adventure after years stuck in a three-legged race hobbling in circles. So when Derek proposed that we discuss both our pending divorces over some beer I agreed with my only motive for consideration being a rebound lay.
The plan seemed simple, assuming my prejudices to be true. He was the office flirt hitting on the vulnerable wife-in-recovery ten years his junior, I was the all too willing wife-in-recovery attracted to the rugged rascal who could probably bench press me. We could fling and flirt yet conveniently avoid all emotional attachments with the clear comprehension of each other’s motives. Besides, with nothing in common we could cut out all that talk time and get down to business.
He wore grey dockers, dress shoes, and a Nike t-shirt – a classification he would dispute arguing that the v neck disqualified it from that category.
I wore skinny jeans, a tight zip-up tank top and heels — yeah!
I suggested a nearby brewpub, one of the old ones that still serve sandwiches and nachos, and on the walk he asked me what brought me to Portland and I gave him the abridged version. When I returned the question he confirmed that he was a native and then proceeded to divulge his life story warts and all. I remember mountains, and farms, and fights and illegitimate kids and a whole rash of bad decisions and heroic actions all spewed out in the same quick-lipped rambling way he had tossed out odd comments on my desk at work, all before we arrived at our destination.
Paraphrasing this history ever since has never failed to lead my friends and family to question my judgment. One quipped, ‘some people have baggage, this guy has a freight train.’ But as he rolled it out I never thought about hopping aboard, I only found myself basking in the shameless bald-faced honesty of it all.
After years spent trying to sort the snippets of my husband’s history together into some sort of chronological order, and failing only to discover lies covering other half-truths exposing another lie, I found myself refreshingly impressed by his candor. He bucked the first date strategy, adopted by my husband and many species of birds who preen their special feathers for the occasion representing themselves with a crown of splendor to sweep a female away into a fervor of expectations that slowly descend from there to disappointment and eventually to regret. Instead, he cleaned out his closet, gathered up his loose luggage and old bones and dropped them at my feet.
Now this should have led me to reassess what I had conjectured to be his motives but no, I was having too much fun to think farther than my face. So I let it go four weeks until the phone rang at 5am on my birthday and I awoke to the words, “I love you. I wanted that to be the first thing you heard this year of your life and for many more.”