Sometimes it hits me:

I am getting divorced.

Life cruelly, indifferently, goes on.

And sometimes that's just the sort of distraction you need. Welcome it.

Not mine anymore

There's a pale band on my finger
Where your ring used to be
There's a hollow space where my heart was
Wind whistles right through

I hate you
I love you
Every five minutes I break down
Though you're killing me right now you're still
The one who knows me best in this world.

Take these tears
Take this pain
I don't need it
I don't need you
I just want you
But what good is wanting what you can't have?

I've never been broken up with before, but "It's not you, it's me." seems to be the standard line anywhere.

I can't help it, though. I guess everyone feels a need to a find a thread of fault somewhere. Maybe if I hadn't let myself go, maybe if i'd changed my name...

He wants an easy transition. He's actually asking for an open marriage in the interim, while "we" sort things out. Friends and roommates, who are free to date other people. It seems selfish and cruel to me, to put us both through all this and then keep everything exactly the same. We have no kids, no house or other property to fight over. A divorce makes the most sense, doesn't it? Why in this convoluted mess do *I* have to ask *him* for that?

Although it seemed sudden to me, he argues that it's actually the culmination of a number of issues for him, mainly that he never wanted to get married in the first place. There are a lot of things I wondered about in my marriage that I just shrugged off: why he never pressed me to change my last name to his. Why after ten years I still call his parents Tita Lyd and Tito Ramon, as if they're just another classmate's parents. Why he never introduced me to any of his coworkers, or his friends from his car forum.

When we got married we were in love, but there was some pressure for us to marry because he had been brought here by his parents and overstayed his tourist visa by a few years. I think that relief was the main thing that the union brought for him. Relief from the parental worry, from fear of deportation, from uncertainty about his being here. I cam here of course expecting what every new bride does: fall in love, get married, have kids. The kids part surprised him. Wasn't it enough just to finally be together?

It became such a sticking point in our relationship that eventually I had to settle for, "We'll talk about it in a few years." We both hoped he'd warm to the idea, especially as his friends and siblings began families of their own. As time passed I grew hopeful. He is such a good uncle to his nieces. We began talking about baby names.

And then Friday night happened. And nothing's been the same since.

I find my emotions run high this week.

Understatement, I know.

Feelings pass, like clouds in the sky. I am trying not to do anything I might regret.

I am hoping some semblance of us survives this. We are both hoping to emerge friends. When I am not hateful or breaking down in tears, we are still the person who knows the other best in the world.

He says this is the most painful thing he's ever had to do, that if he'd had a gun he would have just ended it. I told him he doesn't get off that easy. He's doing this to us, and he had better do something with it, he'd better see it through.

He says we both know who the bigger person is here.

None of it helps, tho, y'know? 32 years old and all alone, and no matter how many guys tell you that you're the best thing that ever happened to them, it doesn't change a goddamn thing.

You can't undo what's been broken. You can only pick up the pieces, and move on.

Last night, he ended it.

Just like that.

April 16th next year we would have been our ten year anniversary. We never made it.

The simplest explanation is that he's found someone else. He's dumping me for a blonde, 20-year-old model, who's witty and into cars. They're not talking forever - yet. But he does want to see where this leads, and to explore the...single life, I guess. The life he might otherwise have had these past ten years.

I am so stupid. It makes sense now that he never wore his wedding ring, he never introduced me as his wife. I never met any of his coworkers or the people he knows from his car forum. Ten years. Ten FUCKING years.

I"m so lost. It's been amicable, and I have been reasonable and curiously still - when I am not bursting into tears, which I have been sporadically since 8 o'clock last night. Though I know all the answers, because we've talked and talked about this, the same questions rail in my head, "Why don't you love me anymore? What did I do wrong? Why are you doing this? What are you doing to us?!"

Can't seem to get my head on straight. Changed my FaceBook profile pic to one of us, in the sunlight, holding drinks. Though it makes me cry to look at it, I want to see it up there. I want to be reminded that we had *something*. We have so few pictures, so few...

I want to chop my hair off and paint myself a mask, a cruel mask that is tough enough to take this, because I can't, I can't...

Someday, i hope

he will look back and think,

"Dammit, I had that!"

On growing up.

While the goal for me is to be old when I am young and young when I am old, in practice I am merely erratic and vacillate between the two. Much of the problem I feel lies in a failure to reconcile with myself, to understand that to get where I am now I had to leave things behind. Also too, the lesson of how choices exclude others is something I have not truly taken to heart.