The end of my marriage had been lurking for quite some time, but like a country mouse who has been advised never to appear nervous when walking city streets, I pretended for as long as I could not to notice it following me. The close quarters of quarantine finally made it impossible for me not to meet its glance, however. So, this summer, I was evicted from the marital house, my home for 15 years, taking nothing with me but a suitcase of clothes and a briefcase of materials for my work.
As I traveled down the road away from that house, it felt wrong that I would not return to harvest the beans and squash that I had planted in the garden. It felt unjust that I could never say goodbye to the familiar corners of my own house, that there would never be another chance to sit on my own front porch and wave hello to the neighbors passing by.
It was too sudden. It was ungracious. Yet, the cruel severity of this departure made it undeniably real.
It occurred to me that the house had never been mine. The porch had never been mine. The bean and squash had never belonged to me.
My wife had never really been my wife.
The marriage had been been a pretense from the start. Part of me recognized that she didn’t mean it when she promised 20 years ago to have me until death. I knew that to her, the commitment was only to see how things went. I spent the entire marriage trying to unknow that.
Over the last several weeks of living alone for the first time since the 1990s, waiting for the divorce to work its way through the COVID-clogged courts, I have come to understand that I am not estranged from my wife. I am estranged from the illusion of my marriage, the illusion of trust, the illusion that I belonged.
Belonging is only temporary. Nothing and no one is our own. Places, people, and possessions pass through our hands as we pass through the world, strangers from start to finish.
