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There wasn't much time between the moment my husband and I decided to get a divorce and the moment I moved out. Packing is an incredible distraction. No matter how much stuff you have and how hard it is to find a new place and get some footing on life, there comes a point where your head slows down long enough to think.
I've reached that point. I can't stop thinking.
I keep thinking about my wedding day. The way our eyes teared-up when we said our vows like neither my husband nor I imagined they would, and the sincerity with which we said the words “until death do us part.” Most of all, I think about the strange man in the waiting room where I'd stood moments before I walked to the altar.
He'd come in unannounced, taken a look at me and said, “so you’re the run-away bride, huh?”
That was the first and last time I saw him. Words like that don't matter in the grand scheme of things, but for those two seconds between the moment he said those words and the moment I began walking down that aisle, it stung like nothing anyone had ever said to me. It stung because I felt it was true.
Now I sit alone on a Saturday night and think about the other great loves of my life, besides my husband. I left them both, too. And I remember each departure as clearly as I remember the words that stranger in the waiting room said to me.
I had been in Sweden with Magnus for some time when the little ice palace we'd built started to melt. Try as we might, we could not keep the walls from caving in on us. The afternoon that we realized this, we'd been enjoying the view of the Baltic. I mentioned to him how lovely it would be to sleep on a pier under the sky.
“I wish I could be as impulsive as you are,” Magnus replied with condescension. “You would hate it. You would freeze in a second and spend the entire night complaining about how miserable the weather was here.”
“Your feet are planted so firmly in on the ground, dear, I'm amazed you can walk,” I shot back.
“Wake up and grow up,” he said, lighting another cigarette.
“Let go and live for a change,” I retorted.
I used to call him Descartes because he reminded me so much of that legend about René Descartes and the boy. Have you heard it? Descartes once visited an abattoir where he saw a boy sketching a dead ox. When the philosopher asked why the boy had chosen such a subject, the young Rembrandt replied, “your philosophy takes away our souls. In my paintings, I will give them back, even to dead animals.”
That was Magnus. The man who saw the world as one composed of substances: mind and matter; mind being the unextended and indivisible and matter being a substance that obeys the laws of classical physics. His incorporeal mind was lodged in his mechanical body, believing—above all things—that the whole of existence, our very individuality as humans, was perhaps a dream, and the only way of knowing we exist is because we think.
I told him we were a bad combination—if he was Descartes, I was a nightingale in a bell jar.
“The dreams of a madman?” He didn't like Einstein.
If his divide stood strong against even the advances of modern physics, how could a woman imagine she could collapse it with a kiss?
“I love you but I hate the way you are,” Magnus said. “I love you but I hate the life you lead. You are going to kill me. You are going to poison every ounce of certainty in my body with madness and turn my world upside down.”
If you listen to your heart and don't let what you wish were true cloud your intuition, you can always sense when something is over. With those words, both Magnus and I knew it was over.
We went back home and made dinner without speaking. We ate in the fading light of the day. Neither he nor I had bothered to turn on the light.
“Now what happens?” he asked after we had finished.
“Now I pack,” I said, rising. And I did. It was the first time I saw him cry. But he didn't stop me.
My mother remembers all of this.
“I remember feeling such apprehension,” she said. “I told him, 'you do realize she's special,' I
