Dear Three,
Hi, I'm Deuce. We haven't met yet, but we will.
I've known about you long before auditions began.
And I've always told him I aim to be your friend.
There are children involved, after all.
You are no doubt lovely, and gentle and kind.
He has top-shelf taste though his budget is sometimes inflated.
He says he is going to wife you soon; very, very soon he tells me.
Perhaps sometime in early October,
when my birthday rolls around.
I think he intends that to stun and sting.
But I am already quite numb from the earlier blows.
Though we are not exactly divorced yet, I tried that whole kinstugi thing.
The gold we found in Rome's mountains could not heal or seal us, and all the King's horses and Prince Simon's men, couldn't put us back together again.
It takes both sides holding their broken parts, together.
While I must note the ease with which two decades have been discarded, it is only a reminder for myself.
You must not read into my tone a longing or desire to change this tide.
To call him back to my side.
We don't crash onto such shores without first losing a battle with the raging sea.
This letter is simply a note of welcome, a word of warning, if needed.
Have you met Ace, yet ?
I would call her One, but he often said "I've got to look out for number One" when referring to himself and his life's affairs. I believe you will find this to be one of the most accurate statements of all .
There was a time we were not permitted to speak of Ace, nor the son she bore him in their youth.
You'll find she is nice, and lovely and gentle and kind...
More in common than you'll realize at first.
There will be differences, but more-so, similarities.
In the beginning, she offered a similar courtesy to me, though she was more brief and to the point:
"He's a liar and I don't care who he dates" she said.
She was finished then as I am now.
He leaves you no choice but to be.
You'll see, eventually.
I know stories will differ, mileage will vary.
Even now, he would have me believe his own fanciful versions of the story we were both there for, assigning himself roles of both victim and hero, while I am cast as villain.
Some days, he is nearly successful at convincing even me.
If I hadn't seen his fingerprints wrapped around young throats for myself, or if I could forget that night in Kentucky, my own breath obstructed as he carried me down our hall by my head, almost he'd persuade even me.
He recently shared with our youngest daughter during visitation, a version where I set out in search of some love, new.
"I didn't do this," he told her "it was your mom who left me."
She is young, but not too young to remember the yelling and the fear he doused our home in, the struck match of grabbed throats and the hold-your-breath encounters when he wasn't very kind.
She remembers the Christmas tree, sailing down the stairs and the splinters of wood when he killed that dining room chair.
After all, it wasn't even that long ago.
She remembers him telling us all to go... and stay the heck gone, too.
He likes to say he hopes I find what I was looking for.
I was looking for safety and an end to the anger, to the constant battling our home had become.
I didn't find it and I don't walk away feeling his best was done by me.
Still, I wish you both the best and all the happiness that may be had under such circumstances.
May this third time be his charm.
shattered
It was meant to be one of those poetic, possibly romantic gestures.
We were celebrating two decades of life together. There had been some brokenness along the way to be sure, but we had survived, persevered and even as recently as this very trip, chosen each other once more.
A few months prior, in a fit of anger, he had taken off his wedding band and set it on the hotel dresser where we were
True to the well-worn pattern, he drew near once the mood had lifted and wanted his ring back, but it had been indefinitely misplaced by then.
We talked of getting rings tattooed.
But he couldn't mark up his body, he said.
Instead, he said he ordered an identical ring to the one he removed. It was coming in the mail, any day now, he said.
I found out later they don't make that ring anymore.
He had not placed an order, but I am sure that he meant to.
Back to the future-past, where we find ourselves in Orlando (Lake Buena Vista to be exact), celebrating twenty years of a continuously renewed subscription.
I purposed to draw another circle around my chosen-again one and headed down to the gift shop.
I chose the shiny black ring.
Some because it mimicked a tattoo and some because of the darkness we had seen.
We always tried to work those quirky little traditional markers into our anniversary gifts.
When we marked 11, it was steel. On our anniversary date, I ducked into a cobbler's shop and asked for two steel nails.
For 15, it was a tiny clay Krystal burger, with Swarovski crystal onions.
Twenty can be marked with china and platinum.
I had seen the picture online that we have all at some point re-posted about kinstugi and the beauty of sealing broken things with gold. You know the one:
I thought I would do is this: break a china bowl, seal the cracks in "platinum gold" and place his new ring inside.
So I took a purchased china bowl into the bathroom of 'our' Embassy Suites and dropped it on the floor.
It didn't break the first few times. I'm not really sure how many times I dropped it before it broke into four distinct pieces.
Perfect.
I trimmed the brokenness in platinum gold paint.
I sealed it together with E6000 (That stuff is really amazing!)
Or I attempted to. It would hold together, until it wouldn't.(Okay, somewhat amazing.)
I used the hairdryer to try and seal it faster, firmer.
I tried to seal it from the inside.
I tried to seal it from the outside.
I tried from both directions.
I tried to seal it with the paint.
The bowl would not be fixed.
Lesson:
Some shattered bowls stay broken.
As Paul Harvey would have us do, I bring the story now to rest.
I threw the bowl away and thought of something else to finish the gift with meaning and metaphor.
We put the children to bed and had dinner in the lobby restaurant just below.
I gave him the ring (which he would remove again a short while later)
And the lyrics to a song:
"...Maybe you and I were never meant to be complete
Could we just be broken together?
If you can bring your shattered dreams and I'll bring mine
Could healing still be spoken and save us?
The only way we'll last forever is broken together..."
But in July, I realized it was time to let the broken bowl be broken.
The song, like me, means well but is mistaken.
You absolutely can last forever, broken but not together.
With broken shards you can sever ties, shatter vows and gild your lies.
New bowls are cheap and easy had,
Swipe left for paper, plastic, diamond-clad.
Broken bowls can't hold things, like cereal or wedding rings.
But pieces can be moved about, rearranged and mired in grout
Now I am mosaic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)