I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades.

I was steeped in denial, but my body knew.

I saw my reflection in their eyes, but not the men themselves, not clearly. This preserved the idea that all intelligent and even vaguely attractive men were essentially good. Delusion detest focus and romance provides...

To keep myself from harming or calling N and to stave off the rage and despair, I focus on my extraordinary son, drink midrange Chardonnay every night after he is asleep, and make a barrage...

Surprises, I feel now, are primarily a form of violence.

This people know where their husbands are. I would like to vomit. I would like to vomit my soul out.

God is great and God is good,” Lisa says. “But where are the Apache attack helicopters when you need them?

You get what you give,” we will tell his sorry, selfish ass.” The Betty Lady has spoken. I detect a Bronx accent.”But,” I demur, “it will make the other woman say, ´See? She IS a...

I used to loathe ambivalence; now I adore it. Ambivalence is my new best friend.

It’s adult swim time and I’m diving in here at the shallow end.

You are the closest I will ever come to magic.

I love you as the mother of my child”: the kiss of death.Mother of His Child: demotion. I am beginning to see this truism: Mothers are not always wives. I have been stripped of a...

Flannel shirts should be outlawed for ex husbands; I realize this now. Flannel shirts are to women what crotchless panties are to men.

Take me now, God!” I shout to the inky sky. “I´m ready.””You´re not ready. You´re not even divorced yet,” Bunny says. “You cannot die married to that man.

I think: I would like to take N back to a story right now, like a rake. I would say, “Oh, this rake is uneven. Do you have any where the tines go straight across?”...

A heart can stop beating for a while, one can still live.

I’ve felt basically lucky ever since, almost every day of my life. That’s something else love should make you feel. It should make you fell fortunate.It will be made clear to you in a stray...

When you moved, I felt squeezed with a wild infatuation and protectiveness. We are one. Nothing, not even death, can change that.

I have a new mantra, which I chant softly to myself: “Oh My God Oh My God.

This is much easier than when N left. Our son is unable to grasp and simultaneously turn doorknobs yet. If only this trick could be unlearned by men over thirty, many more families would celebrate...

My mother is a firm believer in the long pause, useful in interrogations, proclamations of truth, and the occasional cutting dead of someone without their knowing it.

I should have known then it wasn´t nothing, as he called it. But I was eight months pregnant. No sense closing the barn door now, or so I thought. I swallowed the nothing, straightaway after...

People told me not to get married; I didn´t listen. No one ever listens, it seems to me now. Perhaps people should stop trying to communicate. N was not a communicator; early on, I´d insisted...

I know one thing about men,” Bunny says with finality, leaving the room to check on A. “They never die when you want them to.

Soon he was online every night until one or two a.m. Often he would wake up at three of four a.m. and go back online. He would shut down the computer screen when I walked...

After you are here, I will try not to become one of those parents who brag incessantly about their children, who force them to recite the alphabet backward or sing the Lord’s Prayer in German...

He announces that lately he keeps losing things. “Like your wife and child,” I want to say, but don´t. At fourty, I´ve learned not to say everything clever, not to score every point.

The abandonment came, and now this shabby bacchanal.

Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.

I feel angry but not homocidal; this may be unlooked-for progress.

For me, it´s sloth,” I say. “Hedonistic sloth and escapism.

He left a bit too easily and with obvious relief. His feet were swift and sure on the muddy path.

How could you do that to me?” I repeat. I don´t have to itemize. He knows what I speak of.Eventually N produces three answers, in this order:1. “Because I am a complete rotter.” I silently...

I said that additionally, since I was planning to nurse, it be best if you were off the breast before I came back to work. My boss just looked at me dreamily and said, ‘That...

They feel life is for the taking, and that everyone deserves happiness no matter what the cost. I must remember these tricks if I ever decide to have my soul surgically removed.

The Betty Lady explains love and splitting up: “It´s like playing the shell game with Jesus. You can´t figure anything out; it´s best not to try. You´ll just humiliate yourself.

Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. I mentally bless...

The whole world seems tilted, my inner ear displaced by a hole where my spouse used to be.

It had all seemed as inevitable as sunset. Instead it was the beauty of the sun glinting upon the scythe.

Already things are changing; it´s starting with small shit but oh it´s starting, the change, the irrevocable, impossible change.

I am replete with stamina in finding out every single fact I can about this whole affair.Yet, I think, do I want to pull that thread? Do I want to unleash the truth, unravel deceit,...

The marriage is over; counseling is the eulogy. The relationship autopsy is the wake.

It´s like watching someone do a triple backflip dismount and land on two feet, solid, arms splayed in the air. I know I could never do it, don´t even know where I would begin to...

I´ve blown it, the whole grisly charade.

I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

Daily I walk around my small, picturesque town with a thought bubble over my head: Person Going Through A Divorce. When I look at other people, I automatically form thought bubbles over their heads. Happy...

Naturally, I do blame Françoise. I blame her for having N in the first place. She was young, she was beautiful, she was married to a doctor, and she was intelligent. She could have abstained...

So many events and moments that seemed insignificant add up. I remember how for the last Valentine´s Day, N gave flowers but no card. In restaurants, he looked off into the middle distance while my...

I sensed he may have occasionally strayed in some of his past relationships. It was something I felt but ignored, a rent in the fabric of an otherwise splendid garment I thought I could mend....

This is much worse than losing a cat. You do not wish the cat dead, for example, after the first two days. You still love the cat and presumably the cat still loves you, or...