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.

1/4/04 7:00 PM: Yuri,

It's both sad and funny that this missive will be the last thing I ever write for you.

Now, there may be mention of you in poems I've yet to discover, and surely the shadow of our time together will hang over many future relationships (and probably the writing I do about them) but this is the last thing between the two of us. Just you and me.

I've written and erased this letter to you at least twelve times in the eight months since we've parted. There was an angry version, a pleading version, a sad version, a sneering version ... the ability to put a final point of punctuation on the grandest love and the grandest disappointment in my life has not been easy to achieve. Therapy helped. The affection of other women helped. Finding new joys helped. But finally it came down, as I always said everything did, to finding the will power to say, as you finally did, that we're done here. I didn't want to carry the burden of this writing, or this dread, or this lacking finality into a new year.

Neither of us ever imagined we could be in this place, on this side of divorce, from even before we met. You always told people that you were gonna get married once, and that was it. I chose you for my life, abandoning all others. Things didn't exactly work the way we planned.

I have whole days where you don't even cross my mind, finally. I've painted over memories of us at our favorite Indian restaurant or that park where we liked to have picnics, pasting in the image of me and more recent flames, just like Thuthmoses III trying to erase Hatshepsut from the dynastic record. I don't feel a need to jab at the fast forward button or break into a morose mood when I hear "Holding On To You" or "Treat 'Em Right" or "As" or "Grand Verbalizer, What Time Is It?" or "He Loves Me," or any of the songs that became ours through experience and passion and toil.

Before I go on too long, it's important for me to say thank you, for a variety of things. For teaching me that there were joys so transcendant, my chest threatened to burst from being unable to contain them. For teaching me that the price of committment is as expensive as the price of freedom. Most importantly, for loving me the best way you possibly could, given where you were in your life.

I didn't always recognize that you were doing your best. When you were hurting me, and I responded by calling you names like "joyless housefrau crone," I couldn't see how much you wanted to reach for me, but didn't know how, and were too scared to ask. I was hypercritical -- mostly from a space of reactionary pain, true enough -- but I'm a grown man, and I should have known better than to lash out at the woman I chose to stand by my side.

How did we phrase it, when we talked about how we'd describe the end of things? "We graphically underestimated the amount of work required to make it work." I've already apologized, again and again, for pushing you past your boundaries, for not being interested in household maintenance, for having bad credit, for criticizing the joys you developed (and, strangely enough, have subsequently abandoned), and for the worst of it, not standing with you when your father went under the knife. We were both terrible at making the other feel valued, we both have admitted to our share of the responsibility, we both carry no enmity and a heaping serving of shame.

I do have some space of worry left for you, in the huge hall where my love used to live. You've implied to me that you're still largely shouldering this burden on your own, that you're still running from genuine expressions of concern by family and friends, that you're still ducking inside your shell and hoping the world will leave you alone, just like the little girl drowning out her parents arguments with Simon & Garfunkel records. Even through all the anguish and disenchantment and even rage, that tiny space would like you not to walk under that stormcloud, to take away the raining in your head.

The larger part of me reminds me, whenever I do think of you, that your well-being is no longer my concern. It's not my job to plan for your well being any more. No matter how many things I write, how many songs I sing, the one title that I will never shed, that I never sought, is "ex-husband," and that makes that space of worry grow distant and dusty, an artifact of the past tense as much as our marriage is.

I've stopped wanting us back. I've stopped loving you. I've stopped casting the web of my influence around you as protection. The last light has been turned out, the last tumbler turning on the locks, shutting our past away. You said you'd always be a part of my life, and I can't deny that -- past your friendships with my friends, past your resurgent involvement in poetry, all the way to typing on the PowerBook we got on your credit card. But just like my southern accent, you're only there in shadows and sharp reminders that catch my breath in my throat.

It's not as poetic as our beginnings, and it has none of the dramatic crescendo of our romance. It's actually simple enough to sum up in a song, one I discovered months after we parted, from an album of yours that I ripped to MP3 and never listened to ...

For you
It's all in a day
One day in a life
It's all in the one word
The one word is goodbye

For me
It's all in what you say
Though you've tried to be kind
It's all in the words
From the lips that once touched mine with a sigh
Goodbye

For you
It's all in your face
The laugh and worry lines
It's all in the one word
You hope will make you young again
Goodbye

It's all in the play
Someone speaks the line
It's all in the one word
That stops and steals the time
Goodbye
Goodbye
Goodbye

For me
It's all in a day
It's the part in life
When it's all in the words
To fate and circumstance resigned
Goodbye

-- "Goodbye" by Tracy Chapman

I sincerely wish you well, sister.

Goodbye.