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.

5/19/03 4:30 PM: Standing around -- waiting for something to happen or merely in idleness --is among my least favorite things in the world. I remember people perched on stoops or outside the corner store, killing time with indifference, looking expectantly around as if the rest of their lives was gonna drive up in a forest green Thunderbird and take them to delight.

Now, don't get me wrong -- I've spent literally thousands of hours goofing off -- staring at the ceiling or sleeping away the AM of the day. It was always a fiercely private thing. Every aspect of my public visage was motivated, doing something.

I was standing outside The Mint, an LA nightclub that was hosting a rare daytime charity event that I foolishly agreed to cover. It was 12:30 when I showed, despite being told doors opened at noon. I stood for twenty minutes amongst Motown never-was types and trophy dates of the bourgeois, and reflected negatively on idle waiting.

After a vastly disappointing birthday with my then-wife Yuri, I began to make plans to leave her in March 2004. To be honest, it was more scare tactic than reality, as I figgered it could jar her past what I felt was her aversion to working with me (then when she agreed to therapy, I figgered we could limp along until we got there, but I was wrong again). Where once I felt the wamth of her love like Mercury feels sunlight, in January I felt like my orbit was closer to Pluto, and I was still spinning away. Her laissez-faire approach to the start of my third decade especially galled me after the Marshall Plan-level of work I put into her 30th birthday. Oh, and three days prior to said birthday I got laid off.

"What was so bad about your birthday, aside from being unemployed?" you might ask. Well, for months, I said all I wanted was one uninterrupted day of her chocolate pleasures. After the layoff, I was especially in need of the refuge of her arms. But after a morning encounter, she got up and went to work. Hours later, she came home, opened the mail, made some calls, and paid some bills. At bedtime she returned to my side, but quickly fell asleep in my arms.

What disappoints me most about the difference in our committment is that I was a good fit for the role (second half of "us"), but I wasn't vital. As I made a committment to Yuri, only Yuri would do and only she could be my focus. With Yuri committed to "us," she could instead focus on glassware and appearances, parties and gardening. Her idea of us was never community property, and her focus on it was a focus on herself. When I told her, through a great deal of humiliation over having to even say the words, that I needed her to make me feel attractive and wanted, I didn't know it was impossible. I wasn't what she'd ever wanted. Her desire was for a life she envisioned, with a guy who could look like me (better dressed, nicer to people, and more she felt I "could" be) reciting the right lines on cue. She never wanted the change and the sex, the uncomfortable work or the acceptance of my flaws and pain. It may not have been lying, but I do feel misled. Not fair to me, and a blemish on all the joy we had.

Most of what I feel about Yuri is disappointment (along with feeling like I let her down, confusion about what's next and missing her with a love that won't go gentle into the cold, horrible night) -- that she loved a fictional construct made up of pieces of the real me. She often talked about how my personality was like a multifaceted sphere, always having a new aspect to discover. What I didn't know was how she grew tired of new discoveries, because some of the facets she didn't like and some of the facets she couldn't handle. So she made a Husband Hannibal in her mind that would act a certain way, and I was very rarely him (partially because I didn't really get the memo).

My anger is reserved for myself. Like Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe, I wanted so badly for this Egyptian-studying, poetry-writing, freaky, messy, funny, sweet girl to be everything with me. I was wrong to want to believe so badly, because it clearly kept me from seeing so many signs. I'm sorry I didn't try to force a resolution sooner, because Yuri was going to find out, one day, that I wasn't this person she was building up in her mind, and I'm a real "sooner the better" kind of guy. But no -- I was willing to put it off until 2004, live in a house empty of passion and bereft of devotion, because I didn't want to let go of my belief. My own fictional construct. Once again, unrealistic expectations made fools of us both.

I waited too long to fix it, I waited too long for her to come back to me, I waited too long to admit how little love she actually had for me at all. In the glow of a grinning gymnast spending nights in my Jungle apartment, I made excuses for joyless housefrau crone straight out of American Beauty. I was that dirty brother outside the liquor store, waiting on a better day that was never gonna come, and I thought I was better than that.

She told me she really hated this because of her fear that she would never have children now. I don't know a man in the world that would willingly start a committed relationship with a woman who said, "I could go three months without having sex and be okay," so I'd say her fears are very justified. How well adjusted could any relationship be where that energy hangs in the air like incense smoke? It's part of the reason I was adamant about not having kids with her until we were ready emotionally and financially -- to quote Common, "we gotta see eye to eye about family before we can become one."

A poet once wrote that it couldn't be love if it didn't change you. I have been changed, I am a better man today than before I met her, and I wouldn't take away any of our lives together. I can still admit that I chose wrongly and I believed in the face of contradictory fact. I am left here with doubt, longing and a pain that feels like it's jammed between two of my ribs. A hole in my life where hope used to kick up its feet and feel at home. An bed full of regrets that still feels empty. Anger with myself for being in this space at all, disappointment with a woman who did the best she could but never loved the real me.

And words, all these pretty words ...