“What have I to fear
now that there is nothing more to be done?
Since they can make things no worse
for me,
they can no longer alarm me. "- JJ Rousseau
There
are so many things people tell you at the onset of a divorce. They tell you it
will ‘All be okay’, they tell you that ‘you did the right thing’, they tell you
that you should be ‘grateful, you got out in time’ and they tell you to ‘get
back out there and move on as soon as you can’. Armed by your own helplessness, you follow each
piece of advice as it trickles into your consciousness to frame whatever the latest
version of you is bound to become after you are done hibernating in your most
recent version of hell.
For
the first time, I am realizing, that I am somewhat grateful for people. Even, the
silent support of complete strangers that always grated my ego before this
happened. It has been a month since I was pushed to pack up all the scattered
particles of a life I had tried to build over a year; box it all in
cargo and fly home 18 hours after I filed the papers. It now reminds me of that
Diane Lane film, where buried under a heap of hyperbole and melodrama, Lane remarks “The
surprising thing about divorce is that it doesn’t actually kill you”.
In retrospect, what I feel above all the resentment and disillusionment is embarrassment. A deep, permeating sense of utter ashamed-ness at my own person for having known better and not acted otherwise. Most people enter into marriage armed with a dream but I entered into it in spite of mine. Most women, after having gone through a divorce, realize that their lives are so much better on their own but I knew that beforehand. So what grates me above all, isn’t the fact that I ‘ought to have known better’ but that I always did. An entire childhood plagued by the same problems that I eventually sought out for myself just the same. I am utterly, utterly disappointed in myself. And that hurts most of all, because the one time I actually did follow my heart, my head completely exited the premises and everything was shot to hell.
These
days I find myself grasping desperately at the humour in all things. I wade my
time through a series of cheap Pakistani films on television and old Austen
adaptations. I swear at the television and cry as I scroll through the idle
vignettes in my journals and the shoddy, over-posed pictures of my former-lesser
half. I am told this is perfectly normal etiquette for a modern-day divorcee.
Tears are overrated and always to be forsaken in favour of gumption, which is
the order of the day. I think I’ve done well on the latter score, having
already put in two weeks of consultancy work and received a good fat paycheck
to prove that my mind hasn’t gone completely stale in the year I was forced
to shut it down to appease the company I was keeping. Company that happened to believe in alien landings, impending holocausts that one actually needed to stock up for and Illuminati conspiracies that prevented me purchasing
toothpaste, lotion and shower gel among a myriad of other things. I am
beginning to somewhat appreciate the irony in the fact that I chose to marry a person who
believed in the idea of ‘belief’ just as vehemently as I clung to the idea of 'doubt' as life's ultimate exclusion clause. It just goes to show
how far opposites can detract.
I
knew, a month into my marriage, that I was not meant to survive in it. What
kept me stringing on was that quaint notion that marriages are made in
compromise and fortitude and that the institution is not to be trifled with.
The following months saw me perfecting my spouse-savant; cooking, cleaning,
baking, fucking…and whatever else it is wives are derived to do. All the while,
limiting my conversation to grocery lists and ‘how was your day, dear?’ Every
sense of personality wiped clean after being categorically told how
pesky and pervasive mine was. Brain locked firmly away, conscience in a corner
and words held at bay…that was marriage for me. Odd, the manner in which life
chooses to choke the poetry out of us.
Now,
I find myself on the verge again. Of another exhaustive beginning, going it
alone, as I knew I always would. Dhammapada’s disciple a la’ ‘If in your
course, you don’t meet your equal, your better, then continue your course,
firmly alone. There’s no fellowship with fools’ and yet it doesn’t quite fit
this time around because it is not the reality of loneliness that irks me as
much as the idea of it. I fear, the bitterness, that such splitting inevitably
brings. I fear the brittleness of growing into one of those women who begin by
hating men and evolve into hating pretty much everything else. Who spend their
days frowning and who have all the means for happiness but lack a taste for
it. I fear that fate because I can feel it approaching every day and I have
resisted it all my life. I resisted it as the abandoned child, as the charity
case, family fuck-up and as the adult wanderer and I am still not ready to
assume it. But there is something to be said for the power of heart break -
there is an odd poignancy to having personally witnessed a machete taken to a dream one spent
a lifetime constructing. It is a temporary colossus that never was, and while
for everyone else the fact of it will fade away in time, for me the break will
remain. From now on, my life will be classified from this point on and I knew better than to let this be my opus. So yes, I fear, bitterness because I have only
ever calculated my life’s achievements to meet one lowest common denominator:
Happiness. Eudaimonia is why I always
return to Aristotle, even as I bunk-in with Feuerbach and Nietzsche from time to time.
I
find myself raking my nails over my face in rage over my stupidity for having
been that woman, one who thought herself born to forgive a man his mistakes. I wish I
had smashed plates and sworn to my heart’s content but it was not prudent. Maintaining
decorum during divorce meant that I silently pack my life, leave without a cent
(as is becoming quite a trend with me) and not so much as squeak a solitary
defense because I still couldn’t conceive of ‘stooping to that level’. I couldn’t
sift through emails and swear to my heart’s content because I just never chose
to learn how to (not for dearth of material and/or inspiration, mind you). It is quite perverse, this moral mathematics
of the mind; an analogous equation that demands propriety of me, even at the
most inopportune moments. How I wish, that I had inherited a truck load of
venom from a gene pool soaked in salt.
For
now, I have several logical anchors set in place. I am rabidly searching for
work in a different city so I can deconstruct and reconstruct... alone, this time. I am making and
keeping friends because I realize how much I missed them, and not just the mere idea
of them. I am surviving to the staccato heart beat of reminiscing over old
songs, planning new paintings and dreaming of another life that I can actually
work for in this second act. I am relinquishing old appendages, wherever I find
them creeping up. I am shedding weight and bleeding toxins of mind, body
and mannerism. I am finally writing; constructing metaphors for missing moments
spanning a year of both silence and supple salience.
So here's me clearing out barnacles of the mind
and hoping to finally spackle some flesh on the bones of my dreams.
