If I asked an ER surgeon what trauma looks like, she might paint a gruesome scene of injury that cannot be sewn up before the patient bleeds out. If I asked one of the many endurance athletes here in Boulder to define trauma, they might explain it as a positive form of destruction from which a stronger body emerges. I live somewhere in the middle. I’m lucky to not have known brutal physical or emotional traumas. I live with a trauma that is more like a bad roommate. He shares space in my head, has his own bedroom in fact, but always makes a mess of the common areas. After college, I roomed with a coworker who believed he was playing hip hop music at bone marrow penetrating volume only in his half of the apartment. My trauma behaves in the same inconsiderate way, taking more space than I give him. My trauma whispers in my ear when I’m trying to sleep, read a book or enjoy a quiet beer. He asks too many questions for which I have no answers. This goblin roommate of mine keeps asking me why I think I belong here, how long do I think it will take for others to figure out I shouldn’t be at this party? He tells me I am not good enough. If I am somewhere bad, he reminds me of the series of bad decisions I made to get there.
Right now, he is reminding me that I am writing this book in my seventh home since I began what Alice once called ‘my little book’. I began my little book as a travel memoir in the summer of 2017 in the Airstream. The tired evening journal entries were once destined to become a humorous travel and recipe book. I continued to write this story in our house. I once gave the earliest pages to an author I know. He chuckled while reading them at his dining table while I sat across from him sweating. I demanded to know what he laughed at, then jotted the chapter and sentence in a notebook. He told me I had a voice on those pages and I should keep working to develop the voice. After several rounds of revisions, I decided the whole project was self-indulgent bullshit. I put my little book away until Alice and I separated. I dismissed that off-hand comment back then because I did not have the courage to explain that nothing I do is any ‘littler’ than anything she does. In the spring of 2020, alone in a rented apartment with the world shut down in defense against a deadly pandemic and no more reasons to bury the anger of diminishing remarks, I picked up my little book again and went to work editing chapters.
I cannot remember any great fission when my wife and I separated, no more explosions of words. All that debris had already flown out months before. 2019 had begun with a vacation to Europe during the weeks around Christmas and New Years. My company had shut down for the holidays and we took advantage of the forced vacation days by traveling to Copenhagen for several days, a two-day detour to Hamburg and a few days in Reykjavik. Day after day of sightseeing, with Alice often walking a few paces ahead of me, had begun to take a toll. We had an argument in Hamburg because I refused to walk any more streets or see any more cultural marvels in one day. She seemed to be possessed with the dark power to walk forever. How much local culture was enough for her? I wish I had asked that question instead of stating that I am done walking for the evening and would like some dinner. By the end of the trip, we settled into a pattern: I left our Airbnb to find coffee and write in my journal and she would perform yoga on the floor of the rented apartment. Later that summer, we took one more family vacation to the Outer Banks, where her family rents a house on the beach every year. She spent most of her time with her family and I kept to myself alot. One day I rented a bike and cycled for 60 miles along the coastal roads just to have an excuse to be alone. Alice and I went to lunch together one afternoon toward the end of the trip. At some point she told me that she figured she would let me do my own thing. One of the many questions I wish I had asked during our marriage is this: Who did that solitude really serve? Later that summer, we began marriage counseling for the last time. I don’t think one giant boulder fell on our marriage. Thousands of pebbles rained down and became walls.
When I rented the first furnished condo in downtown Boulder, my temporary home to complete divorce mediation, the roommate in my head moved in too. The mean little goblin would ask me why I kept bouncing from home to home. What makes me think I could escape? And next time I’m out, could I pick up some more craft beer and CBD edibles? When his questions became unbearably loud, I would take walks along the Boulder Creek path or around the downtown side streets and alleyways. He would whisper in my ear, ‘what do you expect to find out here?”, until tears pooled behind my sunglasses. As lost and hopeless as I felt, the undercurrent of relief kept me going. The pain of mediation, of being valued based on nothing but my income, of the cold look in Alice’s eyes toward a situation for which I believed she was half responsible, was still less painful than the loneliness of marriage. I left many of those mediation appointments feeling overwhelming relief. I had taken one more step toward freedom, toward a better second half to my life.
When that first short term lease ended I moved into another furnished rental downtown to complete divorce proceedings. My sinister little roommate moved with me again. He whispered the same question after each move: “How the fuck did you end up here?” After the second rented apartment downtown, I would move back into Maria’s basement while my own condo was renovated. My nasty roommate was getting tired of packing up my baggage for each move. Every day had been an emotional cyclone back then; highs and lows crashed in waves. I remember thinking on walks that if someone mugged me or broke into the apartment and stole everything I owned, I would not mind at all. A cup of coffee that didn’t taste how I expected made me question every decision that led me to that rented apartment, until a kind word made me feel like someone might love me again. My tax accountant told me I had handled the mediation well. After two of my bikes were stolen from the carport of that first rented apartment, both the insurance adjuster and the officer who took my report offered an assurance that I would be fine. They didn’t have to say those things. Some days I became convinced that female retail associates and restaurant staff that displayed nothing more than professional courtesy were, in fact, interested in me. In her iconic book, Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron writes about the ease with which we can confuse attention with interest and become obsessed with people in times of crisis. That line alone saved me from a few leaps into another lifeboat (Maria’s perfect description of the dangers of relationship transition). I didn’t know what the second half of my life would look like, but I knew the second half had to be better than the first.
Every first in that period of time had been terrible: the first meeting at the mediator’s office, the first pass through the spreadsheet of our ten years together, the first disagreement over alimony settlement, the first chance meeting on the street, the first trip to the courthouse to file the official ‘petition for the disillusionment of marriage’ (I could not write a better name for a legal document if I tried). There was always another meeting, another version of our settlement spreadsheet to review. The process felt endless but in fact I give Alice and I credit for being civil. In less than two months, just days before Thanksgiving of 2019, we had an agreement I could walk over to the courthouse and hand to a clerk. I didn’t know it then but an error by our mediator would drag the final resolution into January of 2020. We had to join a conference call with the family court magistrate assigned to our case to explain the clerical error. I did not want to pay the mediator for another hour of his time to help me clean up his mistake. I was, by then, well enough versed in Colorado family law to explain to a magistrate what went wrong with our paperwork. The official date of decree for our divorce had been ruled and stamped in January of 2020. The final split of assets would be delayed until May, as the courthouse shut down at the beginning of the COVID pandemic two months later.
During the period of time between moving out of the house and walking the final mediation agreement to the courthouse, I received many signs from the universe that I had made the right decision to move toward a better life for myself. I am not religious but I have a strong belief that the universe operates on mathematics too complex for humans to understand. One evening, while walking around the neighborhood of Maria’s house, I saw a double rainbow. During a trip to the post office to ship a package, I realized I forgot to write the addresses on the box. I hung my head in shame and saw a Sharpie marker lying in the street. After one painful meeting at the mediator’s office, I returned to that first rented condo and saw a cricket the size of a small rodent sitting on the hood of the Tacoma. After another meeting, I found baby birds hatched from a nest built in the corner of the rented carport. On that final walk away from the courthouse, after delivering the signed mediation agreement, I found a wallet on the path, so I returned to the courthouse and gave the wallet to the clerk who had just taken the mediation paperwork. He looked inside at the ID and told me he had just talked to that young man, had his phone number, and would return the wallet. Why did the universe put a rainbow, a marker, a cricket, baby birds, and a wallet in my path? All I know is that I needed every one of those signs. When I felt beyond hope, not worth saving, something told me over and over that I am worth arranging a few trillion atomic particles, just to tell me to keep going. Sure, my friends and family told me the same, but that’s their job. The universe doesn’t have to care. It is a vast impartial judge. I needed to know that It took a moment out of its busy schedule to say that I am right on the path I need to be walking. For all the signs the universe had thrown at me, the one sign that would have caused the biggest course correction would have come from Alice herself. If she had said even once that she wanted to work things out, at any time during our separation or mediation, I would have been tempted to move back into the house. Instead, she wore a persistent look on her face that seemed to indicate that she would spend the rest of her life proving she needed nothing from me except alimony.
All the while, I kept walking and trying like hell not to dwell on the question my roommate kept asking me like a detective working over a suspect in a windowless room under a bare lightbulb: ‘what the fuck do I do now?’ I kept writing short stories. I performed well at my job, received a raise, a promotion, and a few awards. I thought honestly about why I got married in the first place. I thought about our early courtship. We lived in the same condo complex, me in my bachelor condo and she in hers. Our garages had been within eyesight of the other. At the time, I had lived in my condo for four years and my roommate had not yet moved into my head. I had a smart, beautiful girlfriend living close enough to walk over in slippers. I thought I could have been happy with that arrangement for years. I estimated that being 70% hopelessly in love and 30% afraid of being alone in old age would be enough. I suspect that 30% had been just radioactive enough to cause unhealthy traumas. I did not have many good models for a happy marriage. My parents had elevated bickering to an Olympic sport and I vowed never to fall into that pattern with Alice. Maybe we just reached an expiration date. My counselor and I spent much of our therapy sessions during my divorce resolving that I had done enough to try to save the relationship and I had no cause for regret. I agreed with him in terms of my role at the end of our marriage, but not at the beginning. I did have one regret. All those years before, when Alice asked me if I thought we would just be neighbors forever, I wish I had explained that I loved her with all my heart but feared giving up my perceived freedom. I did not have the courage to explain to her, while she stood in front of my balcony door in a sundress, framed in sunlight, that yes I did feel like I could be happy with her as both my partner and my neighbor. That logic made sense to me back then because I had been living in loneliness disguised as freedom. I was afraid I would lose her if I explained that. I regret how ignorant I had been, and how that ignorance had hurt her. I spent a lot of time in that second divorce apartment listing in a notebook all the ways to make the next 45 years of my life better than the first 45 years. What qualities do I want in a partner? What are my values? How do I define a happy life? Who do I want to be? I would review these lists often, scratching out, revising, adding new attributes. When in doubt, I would repeat my new mantra: the next 45.