Cuz I used
to be a superhero
no one could touch me
yeah not even myself
and you were like a phonebooth
that I somehow stumbled into
now look at me
I am just like everybody else.
-Ani DiFranco, “Superhero”
There was a long debate when I first got into that song about whether it was about someone losing love or someone who’d been a self-defensive cold-hearted bastard all their life actually admitting they were falling in love for the first time. While I strongly defended my own relatable interpretation of the former, I ultimately had to concede that in the context of all the lyrics, the rest of the album Dilate, and Ani DiFranco’s own prickly self, it was clear that Fish & Co.’s latter interpretation was actually accurate. However, I quote it here in its old familiar (to me) sense. It’s about losing everything.
I recently lost everything. Everything. I’m confronted each day by the enormity of what I have to confront on a public stage (my life, this blog, my future) and how overwhelming it seems to catch everyone up on the events that so quickly precipitated the dissolution of my marriage. It’s vast. It’s embarrassing, more than anything. Losing love is difficult in the best of times, but having one’s wife of seven years who one deeply loves cheat on one with a guy she’d known for eleven days and call one the next day to inform one of her intent to divorce? It’s the most embarrassing thing imaginable. It reduces all existence, all feeling, all possible thought to a sad little rubble of pure pathetic. My life had steeled me for the possibility of trauma, of sudden unexpected deaths of loved ones. But there was nothing, even the horrors of the PLB situation, that prepared me for this. Every day, every month, every year of marriage better girded me against the idea that something like this could ever possibly happen to me. And then it did.
You should know that I don’t have a monopoly on the feelings or perceptions of this situation. Emily has been upset at the way I’m telling this story to people at times. She doesn’t have the right to be and I don’t much care, but it’s worth throwing in a little disclaimer that she thinks a little differently about a couple of the events than I do. The fact is indisputable that the day before she met this other guy, everything in our marriage seemed great to her except for the reality that we were far apart from each other and had been for a long time. The next day, she was diffident and ready to give our marriage the emotional heft and loyalty that one would offer two-day-old Thai leftovers in the fridge. She has backfilled the story of this overnight change with dissatisfactions about compromises and conflicts in our marriage that were typical and predictable in any marriage, that are in fact the basis and nature of any union between two real people in the real world. The day before the other guy, she felt these were just a part of life; the day after, she decided they were irreconcilable. I would feel a lot better about her perspective if she didn’t say things like the fact that she wanted a marriage without compromises, that she thought she’d be more compatible with someone else because they could go biking and swimming with her. From my perspective, she is indulging in a fairy tale brought on by the extreme stress and duress of our long absence and distance and her ensconcement in a very surreal world called Liberia. From her perspective, she thought that what’s happened was inevitable, even though she spent fifty days missing me in the most clearly articulated terms possible.
Emily doesn’t have a blog, at least not one where she’s likely to talk about her feelings. I think things would be better if she did. I think she would be better off if she did. I wish Emily all the best at this point – we are trying hard to forge a friendship and keep things on the bright side of the road. I still love her, and that extends even all the way to the self-sacrificing extent of wishing her happiness without me. But the story must be told at some point, without being gratuitously gory. This blog itself and my whole attitude about open, honest communication is largely the product of a previous situation of deception and heartbreak. I’m not going to react to my wife giving up on me overnight and cheating on me with anything but a redoubling of that effort. And so even though I am now just like everybody else, a divorced 30-year-old man in America with forearm-length trackmarks of my past romantic sufferings, I also have this resilient commitment to the record, to the life lived wide-open, on display, to a heart whose absorbed slings and arrows can be examined, rotated, note-taken, processed. It’s the only thing, along with my friends who read and report, that gives me hope.
People I’ve talked to recently have all commented on how well I seem to be doing with everything. I spent 30 hours on planes going out to Liberia, four extremely challenging days (and especially nights) there, and 16 hours on planes coming back. It’s a lot of time to think, to self-flagellate, to wonder, to contemplate, to cry. It instills self-awareness, perhaps my highest value amidst all this, made all the more profound and vital for both Emily’s apparent lack of same and for my own imperative need to check my own possible overreactions against reality. Everything for a long time to come is going to come back to the idea of being self-aware, of trying to promote a realistic sense in myself that I know what I’m doing, that I’m making decisions for the right reasons and thinking those through. It works pretty well when I’m talking to someone, doing something, not alone with my thoughts. Then it all starts to slide to the abyss whenever I’m alone, whenever I have to deal with things on my own terms. Falling asleep is the hardest. I never had trouble falling asleep before, almost enjoying the little boxing up of the day and the week and the thought processes I was literally putting to bed for the night. Now it’s the end of the world every time.
I’ve moved to Philadelphia temporarily to reduce the alone time. Living in Fish’s spare bedroom, maybe for a few days, maybe a week, maybe more. Emily returns in about a month, knowing when she does whether she’s going to spend the next year in Liberia or back in Princeton. We will give the state of New Jersey word of her intentions then. I won’t be fighting her, but that doesn’t make it my intention. I foresee wrestling for days with applying my name to the dotted line. It’s so dull, so pathetic, so embarrassing, so sad, so American. A seven-year marriage. A divorce. A disposable culture, a disposable world. Disposable feelings. Those leftovers will probably go bad eventually, might as well chuck ’em now while we still have the chance to buy other food for dinner.
This is not my life. This is my life under the pale descending shadow of a meteor that looms over everyone, lurking in the recesses between your worst nightmares and the last horror film you saw.
People say, when being particularly self-aware, “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.” Almost always, they say it not as a recognition or an absorption of that reality, but as a way of disregarding trivial thoughts of doom. It’s a prayer for the normal, a supplication for the predictable. They do not say it because they are going to change how they live with that bus in mind. Instead, they say it as a way of showing how many days they have lived without getting hit by that bus, as though this somehow proves the bus is a phantom, is impossible.
You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. I’ve been hit by a few buses in my time already. Watch for flying buses.
