The Blessing of Nothingness

I've never really had my heartbroken before, because I had never been as deeply in love as I am with my ex-wife before. If you would've met me before I met my ex, you'd find no one more alienated from, or more skeptical of, notions of "true love," "romance," than me. I was too postmodern, too hip; I cast too jaundiced an eye on the world to ever buy into those lofty fictions.

But my now ex-wife changed all that. Not volitionally, not by any overt act, but by simply being who she was. As we dated and our love grew, I came to see an undeniable authenticity in the way we related to each other. This eventually abraded away my postmodern husk, and she brought me to a state in which I could simply be myself: to love fearlessly, to relinquish the various self-protective gestures, verbal or otherwise, that had been such a part of how I engaged with the world. In a word, she disarmed me.

I have a facility for language. I wrote beautiful words to my wife, but they were not enough to keep her. She used to tell me that I was the funniest person she ever met in her life. The walls of our home constantly rang with laughter; we could communicate whole volumes of thought in a glance, in a touch. I believed we were two souls that had groped toward and found each other in this dark, adversarial thing called existence.

She was my Laura, my Juliet, my Beatrice--she was my Penelope, the woman I always wanted to come home to.

"Closure" I should seek? Relief? Impossible. Scars, whether physical or emotional, are simply the signs of past trauma that we are doomed to drag through the rest of our lives, just as we will drag our broken first marriages, in one way or another, into future relationships. Our ex-spouses will be in bed with us and our future lovers, no matter how much we try to keep such influence in check.

A core conviction of mine: the world is characterized by cruelties of greater or lesser magnitude, of greater or lesser consequence. Love is simply the handmaiden to Hatred, Contempt, and Indifference, the three Fates weaving our destinies as we slide towards Nothingness. Our minds are but feeble bulwarks against this reality, which is why no one gets out of life alive.

Someday my ex-wife and I will cease to be, and thus all that I now endure at her hands will likewise cease to be. Time heals all wounds only because it allows them fester and accumulate, ending in the demise of the wounded.