Grains of Sand

I killed it.

That’s what I usually tell myself about my first marriage.

I’m not drunk tonight, but I did have to talk to my ex-wife about our dogs. She’s taking the dogs because I travel between New York and London so much for work that it wouldn’t be fair to them to be at a boarding facility or a friend’s house every two weeks. I really miss them. Olly is a tricolor Chi, and Tulip is a long-haired mini dachshund; the two dogs were some of my best friends, but I know they’re better off with their mom. I can go and see them occasionally and play and snuggle, but it feels temporary nowadays; temporary might be the hardest part of divorce and leaving. Temporary is like building on a fault line; eventually something’s gonna shake your structure down. I didn’t see the fault line in my marriage.

I don’t think I’ll ever get married again because of that blindness; I’m afraid nowadays to start anything new because I’ve lost so much. I wrote about this somewhere else that I can’t remember. I don’t pursue women because most of them truly do not interest me. I don’t think I would make more than a handful of them happy, so it’s best for us to just shake hands and agree that the hand is a better resting place for me on chilly nights.

Mallory was my best friend, and I will always care so deeply for her. I’ve known her since we were five, in preschool, where I know that we immediately fell in love. Not all love is made equal, though, and I look back to the start of our eventual divorce: we were twenty-two, and I had just gotten my doctorate, which led to a single text to her after years of not talking. Immediately, it was back. But I knew even then she wasn’t the one. She was my best friend but not my companion.

I really fucked up in that moment because I’ve always known she found me much more attractive in a romantic sense than I did her. That’s okay. I figure that most couples actually have this dynamic, and it’s just some weird unspoken truth that we live with. The reason I fucked up is because I really wasn’t attracted to her at all in a sexual way, and I think you need to be at least a bit attracted or it’s just not gonna work. She was always my best friend, but I was young and I didn’t have the heart to tell her how I felt. That made it worse.

That was the first crack in the earth.

The second through one hundredth cracks were all of the trauma that occurred over the next five to six years. Mallory got sick. Mallory got really, really sick. I’m not going to go into details for her privacy, but so readers understand: I was her primary caregiver, and outside of work it was truly all-consuming. You can see the other parts of my life that were happening simultaneously and hopefully come to the correct conclusion that I had so much stress related to work and finances.

I remember feeding our cat chicken breast and white rice and beans, thinking it was acceptable cat food because I couldn’t afford a bag of real food. I remember missing rent payments and getting eviction notices. I remember all of her medical bills for years and the endless credit card debt. I remember sitting with her every night and bathing her.

I would do it all over again in every life that came before or comes after this one.

That’s love.

We missed out on experiencing our twenties, and I still grieve for the lost time; I think Proust would be proud of where I came to over the years with my attempts to make up for that loss and recognize the result. Those missed experiences were cracks two through one hundred.

I was stressed. I gave up all my hobbies. I gave up my financial freedom. I worked endlessly, trying to get new jobs and move up so I could pay off the debt. I worked and worked and worked so I could get the next thing I thought would finally give her relief and give her a home. This is hard; every other zoomer already knows that, but I did it.

The cost was my health, to a degree, my sanity, and everything that made me…..me.

It was worth it, but it caused me to resent my best friend. I don’t think I’ll ever move past the resentment I feel—not toward her anymore, but toward the situation that the world thrust upon me and the people who punched me while I was down; thanks, Mom and Dad. This stress and additional loss of my own self were cracks one hundred and one through a thousand.

I was tied down; I’m not a tied-down person. I hate being tied down and not being able to pack up and move when the world tells me I need to go with the wind. It feels wrong to me, unnatural in a way that I can’t describe. I had a house, then I had two houses, then I had a cat, then I had two dogs, then I had in-laws in my basement, then I had a car; before I knew it, I had lost any freedom I thought I had won through money and being away from my family.

Mallory’s dad pisses me off to no end. He’s a fucking asshole, and that made it so much worse being trapped in a house with a giant toddler. I was a parent to some old codger who wasn’t even my own kin. These were cracks one thousand and one through twenty thousand.

One day it broke.

Her parents had left to go to France, thank God, and I was in a horrid depressive episode caused by my bipolar disorder. I refuse to take antidepressants because they take away even more of me and have awful physiological side effects. I had just gotten my job offer at the hedge fund I work at now and was moving to New York and then London, a long way from Portland, OR, where I still have a small condo.

Side note: Portland is one of the greatest cities in the world and is home, and I’ll come back someday; miss ya, you stinky, dirty, beautifully quirky pit. Also, go to Mikiko Mochi Donuts; Alex is the owner. Tell him to get you chicken and waffles. This is the best gluten-free creation I have ever eaten, and Alex is an awesome dude.

Mallory told me through tears, as we were standing in the kitchen, that I had to take more medication or she would leave me; I told her I couldn’t. We told each other how we would always love each other more than all the grains of sand on the beach.

My marriage ended in that moment.

I got my best friend back.

Love you too, Boris. You’re my brother, don’t worry ;).

We went to three years of marriage counseling. We got back to doing our hobbies. We became ourselves again. We realized we didn’t want the same life, we understood the damage the world had done to our relationship, we took blame for our parts in the mess (I really fucked up with wanting to move to Japan too when I got a job offer there, but that’s a story for another time), and we saw what my disease had done to us but also that I couldn’t lose myself again.

We tried everything we could and kept buying houses and building a life because we both wanted so badly to get back to how we had been when we were twenty-two. There is no going back, only forward; we were different people, and we weren’t the partners who would be there in a happy life with each other.

We’re better as brother and sister.

I’m writing this because I want you to hear something coming from someone who gained and lost and gained everything.

Marriage is hard. There will be hardship. It will feel like when it rains, it pours. People will change. The thing to always remember is that you are yourself, and your partner is a partner and equal in every aspect. Their needs are your needs, and vice versa. You need to know how you want your life to be and truly sit with that before you ever take the step toward permanent companionship. It’s fucking hard to take it back.

Don’t be afraid of loving, of giving it everything you have, and of making only a few true connections that will last your life. Don’t stop looking. You’ll hurt along the way; it’ll be the worst pain you will ever feel. When you find your Mallory, though, and know that no matter what, you’ll always support each other in one way or another, you’ll know every bump along the way was worth it.

I love you, Mallory, and you deserve the man whose life does align with yours. You deserve the man who you don’t have to worry about—whether he’ll be there, whether he’ll be in Utah naked under his kei truck, or whether he’ll be stuck so far in his own head, praying to God that you ask him to just go ice skating on a whim so he doesn’t have to think.

You deserve the man who knows himself well enough that he would take the medicine for you. You deserve the man who can be consistent and present and domestic and won’t ever hurt you through no fault of his own. You deserve him, and he deserves you, and I know you’ll find him.

I hope you still invite me to your wedding and I can smile at you and tell you again….

I love you more than all the grains of sand on the beach.