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

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...

I travel back in time, falling back into what I know for certain, the historical data I cling to in order to not go mad, not assume I made a suicidal and well-informed error in...

The real genesis is forbidden to me, vis-à-vis N´s inability to confess even the mildest transgressions.

In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame.

My mind floats like ash. I blame myself most cruelly.

Although I notice there is never a truly good time to have a nice long chat with one´s mother-in-law, unless you are having an extraordinary life and marriage and your mother-in-law is, say, Maureen Dowd,...

I am going insane. Yes. That is what´s happening. Good. Insane.

They ought to do away with divorce settlements. Instead, both parties should flip a coin. The winner gets to stay where he or she is and keep everything. The loser goes to Paraguay. That´s it.

We talk. Darlene worries aloud that her husband works with a lot of attractive young women; she herself is fourty. I tell her it´s not about age. “Little thing called character,” I say, thinking, Accepting...

How do you know? How best to ensure his nervous breakdown?” I ask.”Keep going,” Christian says. “Just go on as if nothing has happened. We all hate that.

Conversely, I though humiliation would be everything, but it´s such a nothing.

Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?

How can I grieve what is still in motion?” I ask her. “Shoes are still dropping all over the place. I´m not kidding,” I say. “It´s Normandy out there.

Très, très, triste…

The snag about marriage is, it isn´t worth the divorce.

Yes. THANK YOU. And say hello to Judas Iscariot.

I played possum. I did this, as the possum does, out of fear.

I review what I know once again, confronting the monolith now alien and almost unconnected to me: my marriage.

Such silence has an actual sound, the sound of disappearance.

I want to own this transition, not to simply swallow the shame of it entire. I will push for every little irony.

This does not escape my notice, it is a context. I resent the fact of a context; my social status has shifted and no one is going to acknowldege it, that´s certain. I´m expected to...

Someday I will have revenge. I know in advance to keep this to myself, and everyone will be happier. I do understand that I am expected to forgive N and his girlfriend in a timely...

I know my vision is impaired and cannot be trusted with even the simplest tasks, much less dating. Not that I´ve come within talon distance of a man.

I am not ready to think of him as either insane or evil, to consider in full how I could love and have a child with such a person. I am not ready to think...

I remember one desolate Sunday night, wondering: Is this how I´m going to spend the rest of my life? Marrid to someone who is perpetually distracted and somewhat wistful, as though a marvelous party is...

Together we agree that there are few tableaus more pathetic than a woman poring over a plethora of self-help books, while in a small café across town her husband is sharing a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé...