Maybe I was always going to be divorced, turning away from marriage before marrying. One October, the hugeness of the moon an illusion, my mom, older sister, and I are all in marriage’s waning stages.
In a damp rental in Washington state, moisture on the windowsills, I answer a call from my older sister who says her divorce is finally final. Congratulations? She’s been separated for years, and negotiations involving my niece and nephew required a mediator. Now it’s done, and my sister is, maybe, a little more free. She and the kids have long days, my sister an hour commute into San Francisco. They eat dinner late, the windows in the dining room long since dark, their faces reflected to them when they turn to look out.
On the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where I have driven 90 miles to get away for the day, I call my older sister to tell her my marriage has hit black ice, is spinning out; I can’t see how it could get back on track—static on the line—context, I tell her, in case later I call to say—the connection fades then drops. Lapping waves replace each other in succession, crests appear then wane, are waning, gone.
My mom stands halfway down a long driveway in eastern-central Wisconsin to get a signal—she’s never liked living rural though she’s lived there all her life—when she calls to say she will stay through the holidays but then plans to leave Wisconsin and my dad, buy a condo in Colorado, get a divorce.
Maybe we were always headed toward divorce, my parents’ youth and dad’s depression, my sister and brother-in-law’s different languages, my naiveté and my ex’s timer set to spin us toward opposite poles. My sister’s divorce became final, my mom and dad’s imminent, and though I wiped the windowsills every morning, mold crept in during the night.
. . .
In my awkward phase, I’m reaching one arm behind my back or the other in front of me, imagining my leg not bending at the knee, and when talking about the past stumbling over “I” and “we.” Trying to stretch and reach as if I could really touch the far blue wall of sky. I try to feel the four corners of my oblong feet root into the earth; my chest heavy despite filling with air, I try to balance and tell myself to breathe. I visualize flying without leaving the earth, awkward airplane that’ll never work. Awkward angel, I try to relax my shoulder blades down my back. The first awkward age in adolescence, wrong shape for the altitude, missing the intersection of content and form, and again awkward now, feeling for all the world more Miss than Ma’am, some illusion of the eye like when the moon, always the same size, appears huge on the horizon or a pea at the top of the sky, shining between two pinched fingers, a speck in the eye that keeps awkward princesses awake all night.
. . .
I go to bed at 10 p.m., at midnight, at 2 a.m., with the light off, with bathroom light reflected in the mirror, with glowing night-light in the hallway, shining on the ankles of whoever walks by, shining on the floor scratches, shining on the spider working so hard. I sleep on my back with a straight spine, sleep on my side with a memory of being a five-inch curl, sleep on my stomach with heart-protecting instinct. My heart speeds and slows along my breath. My heart flutters. On a scale of one to ten my heart murmurs one-half. On a scale from one to fourteen I miss someone a ten when I lie down alone. When I tell the same stories I am cast back into the winter when the snow started in early December and kept snowing—snow on the lights strung along the fence, snow on my parked car, snow on the hill I slid down on foot. The winter I don’t remember lasted all year. That winter I always had been separated, divorced before I married, had been practicing sleeping alone since every February, on my organic flannel sheets, on my mother’s flowered guest-bed sheets, on my childhood striped sheets, by candlelight, by lightning, by moon.
. . .
Monday to Monday I have no plans. My head is the hollow left in the middle of the pillow, my toes a dark row of waning moons across the sole of my shoe. I think I’ll never do that again. I forget to lock the door, blow out a candle, drag the garbage out to the street. In my face-turned-away phase, new love invites me to move in, and I say no, I couldn’t, I can’t. In my back-turned-to-the-sun phase, I think about the past, think about lost time and lose more. I look up at the stars and see sad stories, see that they are years apart, fleeing earth only to shrink or fatten, claw at the dark, throw themselves overboard into the drowning sky.
. . .
I was not always but later became childless. First I was a child, sitting with my legs tucked beneath me, bare feet crossed, opening my child’s sewing basket, my hair curling and damp from my bath. Twenty-eight years later I tried to make something part me part someone else, but we were incompatible, and in the end could not be combined. One by one friends announce their peppercorn, their ladybug, their crescent, their little honey and send photos of heartbeats swimming in the dark.
. . .
In Las Vegas, despite the all-night lights, I bleed in sync with the full moon. Who ends a sentence with more finality than the moon at the end of the day during which you have fallen out of love. Who more than the moon marries day/night, black/white, joins while separating midnight/noon on either side of the light, divorces opposition by letting opposites live together, unmarried, using separate doors by day then merging after dark. Who gives us pause more than the moon, replacing our interest with hers, making us wonder how something so bright spills anything but her own light.
. . .
Winter to winter I am nowhere, too much or not enough gravity. Balancing barely, I flail and fail to feel balance as a verb. Floating off is mostly how I feel, a phase that’s ongoing, or keeps coming back. Or I come back to it, find myself on the unlit side, traveling in circles, passing and getting passed, only to wake up again in a place of loss. I keep on, keep coming, keep going back.
. . .
In my time-stopped phase, acquaintances move on to the next stage without me. I revolve in place. My accomplishments diminish in the widening space of not having done anything lately. The next thing waits and waits.
. . .
In suffering a private loss, no one gathers in the park with me to lay daisies next to my daisies or drip melted wax on my wrist as we lean lit candle to unlit candle to increase our light.
Trying to eclipse my loss, I say, unconvincingly, “Oh well!” and “It’s not the worst thing to ever happen to someone!” and most people, including my family, who are relieved I’m not face down in the center of the room crying my eyes out, agree—except one woman I know who’s brave in the face of loss who says, “I don’t know. It’s pretty bad.”
Trying to see my loss as normative, trying to shed the stigma of divorce, I joke about separation, dissolution, divorce, and bend over backward to slip beneath the limbo stick of stigma surrounding divorce, high-fiving other divorcées. I try too hard. One moonless night I drive home alone and think, I’m not going to bring it up again.
. . .
In my twilight phase, I lean into the oncoming night, let it reach up around my feet and ankles, stand still and watch the dark rise up from the grass to envelop the maples—the moon a flame-bright wish, and give in to the shadowed side of the earth—the moon a bright white ghost, and hum the night’s vibration, let night press through me, through me and to the dog with her raised brow—the moon an open book. I give in to the crickets, one high and one low in seesaw rhythm, to the moon’s faint-at-first light that brightens at dusk, pulled tall by the night.
. . .
To be someone who knows at any time on any day the moon’s phase, who can point and say the full or gibbous or crescent will rise or set over that mountain or hill or hut or orchard at dusk, or in evening or after midnight, you would have to not resist whatever comes your way, like the time you took a one-way flight from Green Bay to Philadelphia, a bus to JFK, one plane to London, and then another, and watched on a screen the red arrow of the plane’s path, as you flew from Europe to the top of Africa, then turned and flew south to the bottom of the continent, where you tried to nap in a dayroom of gleaming white endless light, and on the final flight from Johannesburg to Maseru, looked down on land divided into plots giving way to scattered plateaus and then mountains, to power and telephone lines trailing off, grid formations spilling open into melted candle wax, and no electricity in round huts, and when the plane touched down in Lesotho, a country defined by its height on a continent defined by its sky, unfold yourself, step down, and say, I live here now.
You would have to not ignore the small, the slight, the pale, the difficult, the wan, the waning, the barely there, the thin line, the beet-colored bleeding light, the scarcely lit, the shrouded in clouds, the low in the sky, the behind the hill, the out of sight.
. . .
In my adorable airport phase, adorable lay in the eye of me. Despite being torn asunder on the prairie, I swooned to the dune-like hills on the way to the regional airport, adored the three-flight-a-day, cat-at-the-baggage-claim, two-vending-machine airport. Driving a visiting poet from the airport to a reading, we learn we have both been divorced, hers further in the past and healed by having a new family. She tells me that the first year sucked, and the second year was spent thinking about how much the first year sucked. When we meet I’ve crossed from year one to two, am feeling an urgency to fly more, and like to stay up late. I’m thinking about lost time, about a month to mourn for each year lost, or five years to mourn for ten, wanting to split the seam, wishing the airport would add a midnight flight.
. . .
During the days of trying out “What if everything is perfect?” I taste what’s in a name, feel space within confines. How being awoken by barking at 4:55 a.m. might be perfect; perfect, the heavy late July air; perfect, the stomach ache. Could an argument be perfect, or sour milk. Compost covered with grass cuttings and breaking down. What about a siren at 6:23 a.m., no internet connection, no bread in the kitchen, coffee without milk. Sleeping on the floor because the moving truck has not yet arrived. Sometimes partly cloudy feels like perfect weather, and silence. On a sultry Wednesday I mourned a dog that died three years ago and my niece’s insecurity since my sister got divorced. I drive, terrified of getting lost, get lost, and find everything. The moving truck that July was delayed two weeks; what was constant shrank smaller and smaller, dissolved into sky. Without possessions I felt perfectly unburdened, but something else was wrong—the one I had moved with, had lived with for ten years, had turned into someone else, in a month had become unrecognizable. The wind picked up, the wind subsided, the air thick with pollen or with tiny yellow blossoms. My niece visited that July and wished she could stay all summer, wished she could get a dog of her own, though we decided a dwarf hamster might be perfect. We woke up one morning, and her nose was running; we made tea that was too hot to drink, read books for a while, and then it was perfect. Having not slept alone in a long time, suspecting that I might be sleeping alone a lot, I went to bed in a room with my niece and slept peacefully all night, dog stretched out beside us. I worried the moving truck might never show up, thought What if it never shows up, what if I have to start over, the rooms perfectly empty.
. . .
I practice yoga’s half-moon pose, steady one foot against the ground while extending the other leg parallel to the earth, and float up easily, one hand on the ground, the other reaching into sky. Geotropically I reach toward every light. I no longer cry and cry. In my foil-wrapped-chocolate-make-the-best-of-February phase, I lean in for a kiss, and every “Oh!” alludes to the moon’s largesse.
Moon cycle photo: Zeusandhera. Creative Commons.