NOTE: As I mentally deconstruct the demise of my marriage, I am publishing a series of short essays about things that happened, the way I felt, and so on. It's intended to illustrate my mental state at the time, and provide a kind of chronicle of my emotional state, hopefully helping me not make the same mistakes in future relationships.

5/13/03 1:05 PM: According to one of my best friends, who has just completed the process, a divorce in California costs $224.50.

This is considerably more expensive than getting married, but somehow that doesn't seem to comfort me. It seems a paltry sum to pay, a cost too small for the loss and the shame and the fear and the crying and the loneliness and the frustration. The cost doesn't include the awkward conversations with your friends, doesn't compensate for the lost sleep and diminished workplace performance. Nowhere in that fee will you find an allocation for healing.

I was talking to another dear friend of more than a decade's acquaintance, Marsha Mitchell Bray. Marsha babysat me into being something closer to a real journalist, back when I was an intern at the Los Angeles Sentinel. Marsha has been married, I believe, since the Paleozoic era, and has known her husband Omar since just after the Earth cooled. Marsha shared my disappointment in the end of my marriage, which she knew made me happier at one point than either of us believed I could be.

She ticked off what she felt were reasons for divorce. Abuse. Serial infidelity. Emotional distaste for one another. When she found out that both of us said we don't want this to be happening, that both of us still love one another, that neither of us did any of the things we did maliciously ... she was appalled. She cited the "better or worse" clause so many of us are familiar with, which my therapist also noted, and demanded that there must be some way to work things out.

My therapist told me about driving across the country and dropping off his first wife to terminate their marriage. He told me that she called the next day, wanting to come home. He told me how he said "no." I can only imagine the cold certainty in his voice that day, I can only guess at the layers of hurt that compressed and forged that diamond-hard resolve into being. He asked me what I would do if Yuri wanted to come back.

I told him, "First of all, I'm not sure that Yuri could ever make me happy" -- the things she said about the nature of her attraction to me, the philosophy she has on committment and on how a relationship could work ... I don't know if I believe she could ever really be what I need, much less what I want. Regardless of that fact, I can't deny the love I feel, I can't deny the committment we made, and I can't deny that there's no real animosity ... so I'd take her back.

He told me I was way ahead of where he was, at the same stage.

On the other hand, I have access to information he doesn't have. I know Yuri's mother, who made a decision and is still coldly locked into it, decades later. Admittedly, there's a considerable amount of animosity in her, from that example, but as far as I've seen, women in Yuri's family, women who have guided and shepherded her through life, simply do not go back to husbands, do not find a hidden reserve of love or suddenly realize they made a mistake. I don't ever believe I'll feel her love shining on me again.

"For better or worse" with just these exceptions, and here's your reciept.