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.

6/27/03 3:45 AM: It was the tilt of her head, the angle of her smile as she complimented me. Neither time nor place, nor really her identity matter when you look at things from a larger standpoint. The relevant thing is that she was sitting with me, and she was close to me, and she was attracted to me. Most importantly, she wasn't my now-ex-wife.

Prior to fairly recently (relatively speaking, I mean, "recently" in geological time means the days of pyramids and the Nile Valley feeding most of the world), it had been more than four years since I'd kissed a woman who wasn't Yuri. Even in times of extreme frustration, even when I really could have, I never made a play for another. It wasn't something I was capable of. So, after some clumsy opening moves, I found myself on a date with a beautiful Black woman -- someone so dangerously new the very scent of her gave me a contact high -- and she liked me. I didn't guess that she liked me, didn't try to read interest into random occurrences or stolen moments. She opened her full, splendid lips and told me how attractive she thought I was, with no pause nor prevarication.

That's where I noticed it. For the first time in years, I felt alive -- swooningly, this-could-be-it, wow-this-must-be-what-angels-feel-like alive. Vital. Energized. Free.

It actually made me miss a beat in the conversation, cautiously regaining my balance and thanking her. When I got a free second, I stopped to reflect on the real difference in the consistency of my life. That hanging dread and terrible waiting that clung to my existence like cloud cover over Tacoma was gone. I looked up at the sky -- clear, blue, unmarred by cirrus or cumulonimbus. I smiled, wide and giddy with the swirling graceful realization that I am beautiful and I can feel happiness again.

In the words of my ex-wife (and even calling her that seems more natural than saying her name now, another alien experience), "faith has taken a sabbatical with an open ended ticket ... disappointment and compromise seem the bastard twins orphaned on [the] doorstep." That was the day-to-day existence in our marriage for more time than either of us wanted to admit, for longer than most of the people who knew us could believe. Long days of clipped conversations and passing each other in hallways, never connecting. An interminable sense of anxiety, waiting for something, anything, to happen. This horrible, haunting dread that somehow I had become the ugly boy some grade school harridan called me, that I was beyond the reach of admiration.

That was then. Now, I even remember with some fondness the crisp cracking sound of our decision. Today, I can scroll through the caller ID to examine the evidence of my appeal. I can savor the taste of new lips that call my name with wonder and desire.

Still, I know that I've been changed. I hear that voice, calling for me, and I wonder what it will sound like when it meets disappointment. Gazing into those eyes, I strain to peer through time and find out what pain that visage will hold when I inevitably fail her. This is the way of things. Those who love you are fallible, human. I did the best I could, through the fire of dot-bomb economies and crises of faith that would make Jesus falter, and still I let down the one who loved me better than any I could ever remember. How can this new flame hope to burn in torrents of bitter possibility? I know that she too will leave, one day, either by choice or by fate. I know now, all relationships are temporary.

So the shadow of my favorite mistakes and my grandest failures follow my lanky frame from poetry readings to karaoke bars, brushing against the hunger of newborn passion. Still, I grasp this moment and embrace this day like it was my departed great aunt, who raised me and believed in me and showed me that unconditional faith can be rewarded, as I have struggled to stand and outpace her dreams. In that moment, when I felt so alive and realized the difference from where I'd been, I didn't run. I didn't sabotage myself. I didn't screw it up beyond redemption, and I hope my experience will shine a way to a me that never will.

Reaching for the light of that finer world, one second at a time.