The Left

This is a WIP
Enjoy!

I have heard that divorce is nothing. I have heard that it’s just a matter of words on paper. It’s an easy way out in a world of drive-thru decisions. I know better. I know that it matters, I know because it mattered so much to me when I was seven going on eight that my throat hurt with the effort of not saying the things I wanted to say to my Mom or to my Dad. I know that divorce is a living breathing entity that lives on, far beyond the paper it’s written on. It fills the room the way smoke can when the windows are closed. It has a taste, for me it was molasses mixed with butter, the sweet burnt smell that will forever make me melancholy. For my brother it was bacon. We both ate looking at the table at our Grandmothers house, listening to people talk as if we weren’t there or couldn’t comprehend what they were saying.
For my husband the taste was Juicy Fruit gum, the gum his mother passed him over the airplane seats as they moved from Michigan to Georgia in one weekend. He won’t chew it to this day. Divorce has a smell, as well, a bitter desperate smell that reminds you of cheap bars that stand alone next to neon blinking hotels.
You can argue that it’s petty to blame your parents for your hardships. I would tend to agree. I am generally inclined to agree. I think that past a certain age, get over it, and move on. I know that things can be bad; I know one of the worse things you can see are your parents kissing someone else for the first time. I know that seeing them as people when you are too young to actually think of them in these terms is confusing and maturing to say the least.
Sean and I came from similar places of pain and so I thought we were on the same page. I thought he knew and agreed to my terms of living. I absolutely refused to be blindsided by anything.
I had laid down the law in the early days of our relationship. I wasn’t one to shy away from what I considered to be an essential part of me. We were munching pizza in the common room of our dorm, lying end to end on an enormous faded and smelly couch. He was absentmindedly rubbing my bare foot with one hand as we discussed random things. When the subject of parents came up, I resisted the urge to sit up. The subject made me so tense I tossed my unfinished pizza back into the box.
“My Mom left when I was in kindergarten.” I said, looking at him to gauge his reaction.
“Oh, well, My Mom and Dad split when I was ten or so.” He stopped rubbing my foot and stopped inhaling the pizza, I noticed, though he didn’t put it down.
We were both silent for a minute and I thought about how best to say what I was thinking. I should say what Clara, my roommate and current best friend, had discussed ad naseum. Which was that when a parent leaves, even if they are replaced you are then and always one of the ‘left.’ As in, one of the left behind. It makes you sketchy and suspicious for the rest of your life, you can’t help it. It’s Sean who breaks the silence.
“Did your Dad remarry?” he asked, skating lightly into the sensitive discussion.
“He did.” I answer. “When I was fifteen, she’s still around, but...” I pause, and Sean hears what is in my silence.
“But you remind her of your Mom and the life her current husband had before you were around?”
It shocked me that he was so insightful, but as tears pricked my eyes I thought about the pain still lodged in my chest. I thought about how it might always be this way. I might always wonder why I was a girl my Mom didn’t want. “I can’t do it. I could never divorce. I won’t do it to my kids.” I proclaimed rather vehemently for a nineteen year old who three years earlier had decreed she didn’t want children, she never would. Sean simply looked at me. A gorgeous boy on the cusp of man hood, his green eyes shiny from his own unshed tears and nodded. “I know you won’t