Living Lonely After A Divorce — 'We Lost Each Other In Our Crowded Life'
We couldn't trust what we'd become.
Yan Agrit | Unsplash, perfectwave | Canva We found each other at the Louvre standing in front of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. Turns out we were both studying abroad at the Sorbonne, and we pieced together our love in the beauty of broken French.
Back in New York, as we sat in Bel Ami Café in the luster of twilight, I leaned into Kat’s warm breath and smiled. We were giddy on expresso, hookah, and patisserie as we scribbled a wedding announcement on a cocktail napkin.
We had our moments of intimacy like the week we savored Catoctin Creek rye whiskey in a rustic lake cabin with woven American Indian burden baskets hung on the cypress walls. We discovered the essence of incineration and salvation in a stone fireplace.
Outside, serrated lightning knifed into a rough cliff with gnarled cedar trees clinging like mountain climbers to a stratum of limestone and quartz. Content, we smelled the spice and fruit aroma swirled in whiskey glasses.
Barefoot and blanketed, we tossed our best future into the glowing stack of wood.
The storm stilled, sheet lightning blanketed the sky like the afterglow of the storm ripped from a god’s awe.
She trusted enough to expose her dream face. I memorized the mole on her neck, her gold nose ring, the dimple indenting her chin, the caffe latte birthmark on her forehead, and the crimped wavelets of midnight cascading down her back.
We were divine sparks, crackling side-by-side, almost merging. When she turned on her side, I craved the curves of nakedness but tenderly covered flesh of my flesh with a brown wool blanket embroidered with Kokopelli flute players.
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We lost each other in our crowded life and couldn’t trust what we’d become.
The years weighed heavy. We found it impossible to dance. And yet, I held on to our song and tried to catch simple answers in the memorized lyrics falling like ashes at our feet.
At the same lake house, by kerosene lamplight with the smell of birch seething in the fireplace, her silhouette ripped a fishhook from my heart. She confessed our lives were parallel rails of abandoned railroad tracks. She hid her nakedness under the mercy of darkness. She couldn’t touch me anymore.
Nothing was left to be said. A night storm quelled, and a breeze bordering on silence stroked the top of pines like the gentle swish of a drum brush sweeping across the head. I felt the essence of sorrow.
And yet, I held on to our song. We were two ships moored and rocking but never touching. That night, I watched her hugging the pillow, half smiling in her sleep.
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I unearthed divorce papers from the broken black mailbox, an archeologist unburying ancient papyrus fragments preserved in ceramic jars deep within dry, dark caves.
Foreign words broken by time obliterated sacred history. The death blow, the estocada. From a dusty bedroom window, I watched my wife plunge a For Sale sign into thick Emerald Zoysia grass.
Autumn walk, muscle memory enticed our hands together. We reminisced, remembering the first time we met in the Louvre, young, fresh, full of future mistakes.
An awkward silence separated our hands into our pockets. Gusty winds tore clinging leaves from a Redbud. Purple drifted away from gnarled branches and settled unnoticed among scattered leaves turned brittle on our path.
Movers roughly jostled my private, protected pain as they dismantled the marital bed, disrupted dream dances, our bodies unconsciously shifting, turning on the mattress, in rhythmic patterns choreographed by years of intimacy. Those movers eviscerated the house, shrink-wrapped memories, and left a carcass picked clean by a wake of real estate agents.
I roamed the gutted house, stairs creaked, hammered by anger boots. Her perfume lingered on torn pillows, and dog-eared pictures of our marriage were discarded and forgotten, swept into a dusty corner.
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For years, I searched for my ex-wife in the eyes of different women, a moth drawn to and burning in the flames of strangers.
I glimpsed her image in a Paris café, self-exiled, sipping expresso and romance, reading Joyce’s Ulysses. The stranger left my memories and dreams to stroll alone down the left bank into another generation.
I spotted her again in San Antonio, a stranger in a red sports car, singing into the wind. At night, we lay naked, and she wore my wife’s tattoo on her shoulder.
Framed by the window, I imagined the silver moon dancing with my wife’s coy sensuality in and out of moving clouds. I traced the unfamiliar curves of the stranger’s back, searching for a name, for the meaning of touch, for the wounds I knew so well.
In the end, heavy rain began to fall, and the wind rattled the skeleton trees of winter, startling memories of my baby like a flurry of wings. The sorrow was almost too much when the bedsprings began a low moan.
The last time I saw Kat, she hid her eyes behind Dolce and Gabbana sunglasses she couldn’t afford, made me shiver with a kiss on the cheek, left a permafrost of silence behind her that froze even the weeks at the lake with sparks snapping against a screen across the stone fireplace.
Be kind to yourself; I shouted as her Chelsea boots clipped past a rundown newsstand on 68th street and past the Bel Ami Café, and its pinecone wreath hung on the door. A picture of Kat accosted me a few years later on 5th Avenue, a poster of her photography exhibit at a high-end art gallery.
The advertisement captured the odd angle of suffering: a slanted turquoise beret, a green shawl, a smile that never reached her eyes, and a mask of success. I walked the exhibit, came out scarred, she had perfected her pain.
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Getting by without Kat drove me to lonely places, like the end of a rickety pier near Ventnor, New Jersey.
I cast for sea bass, welded my life to overcast winter skies, and let the weather chill me down to the bones of memories of Kat.
Unbuffered wind gusts pried open and slammed shut the rusty metal door of the wooden tackle and bait shop that displayed, most mornings, freshly caught grouper on ice. One weather-beaten daybreak, a hunched, unshaven angler, nameless, with wrinkles carved in worn Honduras mahogany, solitary, braced against the longshore winds next to me at the end of the pier.
Fishing the trough along the pilings this morning, his fishing report dropped heavy into the ocean like a weighed lure. He stared out to sea, shook his head, and revealed he had lost his wife five years ago. He paused and whispered, I live lonely. His life tumbled toward me: dreamless nights, smell of whiskey, bass, and blood, talking to strangers about his wife.
He lived alone somewhere along the boardwalk away from the glitz and glamour of Atlantic City. His confession drifted with the wind currents, like seagulls veering into sunrise.
At dusk, I watched the old man gather his poles, buckets, and creel. His rubber boots squished past the open-air fish market, empty crates stacked along the kiosks, broken crab traps and nets, a radio humming the oldies, wet ropes yanked tight around posts to secure bobbing boats temporarily docked for fuel or supplies.
He turned down a side street. His silhouette slowly merged with the darkness and disappeared. As I watched, I cried my way into the arms of God.
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God slowly transformed my mind. He showed me that morning glory, like my mind, bloomed beautifully every morning.
He taught me that the honeysuckle draped over the fence in my backyard faithfully bloomed every season. I pressed a conch to my ear and listened to new worlds whisper to my imagination.
Most of all, I learned that music never dies. I met Mariam in a downtown dance hall. We sparred about Proust and Plath
and sang all night with the jukebox.
In my apartment, we spent evenings dancing to Michael Jackson as the light glowed behind her midnight eyes. On Wednesdays, the crowded metro rattled our hearts on the northbound train to the High Museum.
We took a vacation we couldn’t afford. Sunrise burned the haze off the summit of Haleakala in Maui. We made love behind a cascading waterfall on a private island off the coast of Kauai.
Present moments took root, tunneling deep into our past, stretching upward toward petalled future promises. We found our groove and grace spinning the vinyl. We danced with all our might to Michael, Springsteen, and the Stones, knowing nothing would wither to goodbye as long as the music never died.
Theodore McDowell is a poet who has published five poetry books exploring trauma, forgiveness, and relationships. The five books include Wrestling a Blessing From God, Yearning For Human Touch, Evenings on the Edge of Death, Excavating the Cruelty of Memories, and Drinking From God's Well.