The Passage of Time

I'm going to sleep early tonight--I promise--but I have to speak on this first.



It was ten years ago tonight that I left David, my first husband.



I remember coming home--"home" at the time being his mom's house, since he was trying to start another of his cockamamie "business ventures". The clusterfuck du jour was an online service which he swore would be the death of AOL.



I'd been out that night, saying my goodbyes to JP. I knew I was going to leave David, but I wanted to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons--not to get away from one man just to be with another, but to make a change in MY life. And so JP had agreed, reluctantly, to a three-month moratorium on our relationship--which we'd been carrying on all summer, with a fury I still can't even think about without incredible grief. To have lost all that....Anyway.



So we had made a pact, JP and I: we would see each other one last time on Sept. 3rd--we had tickets to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Hole--and then we wouldn't see each other again til I was out on my own--contingent on having money to move into a new place. I was 24, jobless, waiting for interviews which didn't come; David had quit his job a few weeks before, without even consulting with me, so he could concentrate on his business. David and I were living at his mom's, in debt to our eyeballs, no health insurance, no anything--and I was in love with someone else.



Unlike most nights that summer, JP and I didn't fool around at all--in fact, I remember going home early because we both knew that moratorium wasn't going to survive unless one or both of us developed a sudden case of willpower. So I drove back to Dave's mom's, and plopped in front of the TV watching "All In The Family".



The phone rang.



"Hey baby," Dave said. "How are you? Whatcha doin'? Hey, listen, I have a question."



"Yeah?"



"Did you use a condom when you fucked him, at least?"



I'd left a disk in the computer. I was working on a novel that summer; along with the novel, I'd been writing tons and tons--poetry, short stories, thinly-fictionalized journal entries. It was these last that he'd found.



To my credit--the only credit I can claim--I stayed there long enough for him to confront me; to yell and scream and spew all the anger I'd earned from him. But at the end of the night I packed up the things that meant the most to me, and I left at 3 AM and went back to my mom's. I remember waking her, how scared she was; I remember telling her the same lie I'd told David: that nothing had happened, that he'd misinterpreted what he'd read, that nothing had happened, nothing had happened, nothing had happened. I had no intention of going back to David but I wasn't going to find myself homeless, cast out of my mother's house for the offense of loving someone of a different race.



I hadn't yet learned how strong I was. I was still 24 and afraid of being wrong, of being bad, of being unloved and alone and at the mercy of the world. The next two years would teach me lessons I'd never expected to need; but that night I was scared...scared, and exhilarated, and thrilled to be free.



And I was 24, and now I'm 34, and I would give almost anything in the world to be that scared, exhilarated 24-year-old again. I would give anything to be zooming down the Dan Ryan in a beat-up blue Hyundai at 3 in the morning, cutting off trucks and listening to "Fantastic Voyage", on my way from one life into another, and I would do anything, anything at all, to have JP somewhere in that new life.



It's been ten years tonight, and how impossible that seems, I just can't tell you.