Dates have always been important to me. I like birthdays and anniversaries and when something happens one of my first instincts is to look at the calendar. Remember. And for the most part, I do.
I like the gravitas of marking time. I don’t want to change that about myself. But some dates sting.
I chose June 13th as my wedding day because I wanted a summer wedding and my venue didn’t do wedding dates in July or August. I wanted it on a Saturday, but the next weekend was my birthday and I didn’t want to get married on my birthday weekend. The 13th was my fiancé’s favorite number.
June 13th, 2015.
If I held that day in a glass orb without the context of any other days before or after, it was one of the best days of my life. I was so incandescently happy.
A smattering of moments: waking up to breakfast in bed, bagels with my girls while getting our hair done, my dress with color shimmering in the skirt, the rain changing our plans but the intimate ceremony it resulted in within the lodge with guests on rocking chairs and benches, wearing my grandmother’s pearls and my mother’s ring, the way he kissed me, my red rain boots, my red wedges, fondue waiting for us at the reception, everyone everyone everyone I loved together in the place I loved best of all in Door County, dancing with my father, the feeling of calm and beauty and pure fucking joy I carried with me all day.
I was so incandescently happy.
“Look at it as a final celebration of your relationship,” my therapist would tell me later. Not much later, just months, while I held back sobs and shook my head and didn’t understand how he could say that our wedding day was one of the best days of his life and that he didn’t love me in nearly the same breath.
“If you want to be loved you have to be the kind of person worth loving.”
It was a spectacular wipeout. A bucket of poison poured on everything our wedding and marriage was supposed to mean.
I’m tired of being knocked out about it. Maybe in one lifetime, we’d be celebrating our four year anniversary right now. Maybe in one lifetime, we would have made each other happy. But we didn’t make each other happy. It’s good we aren’t celebrating our anniversary. It’s good that by the time we marked year one we were already living in different apartments.
Getting divorced was the most difficult trial of my life. I was twenty-four when I went to court, alone, to stand before a judge and end our decade long relationship. I texted him from the courthouse bathroom that it was final and to take care of himself. I’ve spent unslept nights, and wine-soaked evenings and entire seasons mourning and wishing it could have been different.
It changed who I am and what I believe in. It changed how I think about love and partnerships and my personal agency. It changed how I view my own strength and my own vulnerabilities. Four years down the road, and I don’t wish it was different. This was and is the path.
The grief isn’t fresh anymore. Over three years since our separation and I rarely feel overwhelmed by it. I miss, sometimes, the boy and girl we used to be but we are not those people anymore. I hope we are both becoming the people we want to be. I think I am. I loved that little girl, but I will never be her again.
But today is June 13th and I have never been good at letting dates slide off me. I’m looking for the right words for gratitude and love and sadness and never going back. I loved him, we loved each other, the day meant something to both of us even if we don’t love each other anymore. I’m looking for the right words to say that I am angry at how it all turned out but that I still loved it and still wanted it.
Freeze the moment. Hold the best of each other. Let it go.
With Love,
Natalie