you have to wonder about a man who will cry on the shoulder of the woman he’s hurt, asking her to comfort him about how badly it makes him feel to have hurt her, to be hurting her, to plan to hurt her further in the future.

it’s something to know that it is all somehow my fault: I didn’t make love when I wasn’t feeling loved, didn’t comfort when I had no one to comfort me, didn’t be the magic appliance that gave all and then gave more and then gave out and needed no maintenance to keep going, so the lack was not brokenness but withholding

seriously, how does that work?

still wondering how a divorce could possibly double an income, grant a magical apartment where he will somehow heal himself and forgive himself and be magnanimous in his generosity toward himself, how a divorce is going to make him twenty again with no abandoned wife in the rear-view mirror, no children dusty from the speed of his escape.

he sloughs off his conscience so easily

he claims the blame without shouldering the responsibility, turning the snake back on itself until it is everyone’s fault but his own

for expecting him to make right what he has wronged

the mornings, the evenings, where he chatters sunnily about the bright future he will have once he has sundered the chain connecting him to the people he is talking to – they will be all right, they will be all right, once he has cut through the last chords of affection tying us all together, they will be all right he announces cheerfully once he has cast them off every one.

the astonishment of our love turned back on itself, unwanted so long as it bears no material benefit – he

has no need of love that does not provide amplifiers, and guitars, and wild license, the freedom to do as he will without consequence of broken people

you had a paycheck, he says.

yes.

And now even that is withdrawn. He is done wasting time on the unprofitable marriage that only provided love, and stability, and a home

and children, and a friend that would have been there forever had he only been there a little less part-time.