You know when you’re on a walk and you step in gum? First, you silently curse the person that so carelessly dumped the gooey wad, then you try and remove the sole perpetrator by dragging your foot along the ground as if your foot is made of lead. Finally you surrender to the fact that you have to remove the gum manually. Hopefully you find a stick but more likely it will be your hand covered in some sort of paper or tissue. You finally manage to pull the gum off of your sole. Or should I say you pull half of the gum off your shoe and the other half remains stuck.
Now you have a stringy, sticky, grass and dirt covered, all the way chewed piece of gum in a piece of tissue, with remnants on the sole of your shoe. The gum doesn’t look like it once did. No longer wrapped in a shiny silver wrapper, sweet smelling and ready to enjoy.
That is my heart. It now looks and feels like that chewed up piece of gum. It is dirt and grass covered with remnants of tissue stuck to it. It is destroyed. My problem is that I keep thinking that I can put my heart back together. I am having the hardest time realizing that, just like that piece of gum, my heart will never go back to its original shape. At this point I am pretty sure if a doctor opened my chest and looked at my heart, they would say “Yikes! “ There is nothing we can do”.
Everywhere I turn I am reminded that I am no longer married. Every fucking place I turn. I go to the grocery store and see gigantic diamond ring ads. As I’m driving I see engagement ring ads. Commercials on T.V. telling every single man that, now is the time to propose. All of these things say to me:
“You ain’t married, you ain’t shit. At least that’s what it feels like.
But wait, see my mangled heart, I was married, I was shit (no one gets out of a marriage without some sort of mangled heart, divorce or death). This is my struggle. I don’t know how to accept the new shape of my heart. I don’t know how to merge my longing for my marriage and my broken heart and my new found knowledge and independence. There are certain things I like about being single, I have gained self-confidence, self-awareness and tons of other words with hyphens. So there it is. The non dilemma, the non issue. I can’t make the decision to go back to being married to Peter. I suppose there is a feeling of accomplishment, having finished my marriage. There is a finality to having a dead spouse. But at some point I want to be able to say “I am shit”, whether or not I am married. I’m not there yet but I’m drinking milk and some day…