Suzanne Finnamore

“Someday I will have revenge. I know in advance to keep this to myself, and everyone will be happier. I do understand that I am expected to forgive N and his girlfriend in a timely fashion, and move on to a life of vegetarian cooking and difficult yoga positions and self-realization, and make this so much easier and more pleasant for all concerned.”

“They feel life is for the taking, and that everyone deserves happiness no matter what the cost. I must remember these tricks if I ever decide to have my soul surgically removed.”

“How can I grieve what is still in motion?" I ask her. "Shoes are still dropping all over the place. I´m not kidding," I say. "It´s Normandy out there.”

“It seems a very specific bid: I´ll take Famous Authors for five hundred.”

“Although I notice there is never a truly good time to have a nice long chat with one´s mother-in-law, unless you are having an extraordinary life and marriage and your mother-in-law is, say, Maureen Dowd, or Indira Gandhi. Someone of that ilk.”

“Naturally, I do blame Françoise. I blame her for having N in the first place. She was young, she was beautiful, she was married to a doctor, and she was intelligent. She could have abstained from producing her first son. It was wrong on a variety of levels.”

“Très, très, triste...”

“I feel incendiary, a wildfire. My spirit licks at the gates of a very elaborate, customized, and distracting emotional Hades.”

“Daily I walk around my small, picturesque town with a thought bubble over my head: Person Going Through A Divorce. When I look at other people, I automatically form thought bubbles over their heads. Happy Couple With Stroller. Innocent Teenage Girl With Her Whole Life Ahead Of Her. Content Grandmother And Grandfather Visiting Town Where Their Grandchildren Live With Intact Parents. Secure Housewife With Big Diamond. Undamaged Group Of Young Men On Skateboards. Good Man With Baby In BabyBjörn Who Loves His Wife. Dogs Who Never Have To Worry. Young Kids Kissing Publicly. Then every so often I see one like me, one of the shambling gaunt women without makeup, looking older than she is: Divorcing Woman Wondering How The Fuck This Happened.”

“He left a bit too easily and with obvious relief. His feet were swift and sure on the muddy path.”

“I played possum. I did this, as the possum does, out of fear.”

“Conversely, I though humiliation would be everything, but it´s such a nothing.”

“I feel angry but not homocidal; this may be unlooked-for progress.”

“I travel back in time, falling back into what I know for certain, the historical data I cling to in order to not go mad, not assume I made a suicidal and well-informed error in marrying this man.”

“I was steeped in denial, but my body knew.”

“Soon he was online every night until one or two a.m. Often he would wake up at three of four a.m. and go back online. He would shut down the computer screen when I walked in. In the past, he used to take the laptop to bed with him and we would both be on our laptops, hips touching. He stopped doing that, slipping off to his office instead and closing the door even when A was asleep. He started closing doors behind him. I was steeped in denial, but my body knew.”

“It´s a little song about abandonment, and it goes something like this....”

“It´s like watching someone do a triple backflip dismount and land on two feet, solid, arms splayed in the air. I know I could never do it, don´t even know where I would begin to learn, but some people are built for it. He was handcrafted to leave, had practiced on other women since adolescence. I was one of an unnumbered series.”

“This is much easier than when N left. Our son is unable to grasp and simultaneously turn doorknobs yet. If only this trick could be unlearned by men over thirty, many more families would celebrate Christmas together.”

“They ought to do away with divorce settlements. Instead, both parties should flip a coin. The winner gets to stay where he or she is and keep everything. The loser goes to Paraguay. That´s it.”

“I want to own this transition, not to simply swallow the shame of it entire. I will push for every little irony.”

“I know one thing about men," Bunny says with finality, leaving the room to check on A. "They never die when you want them to.”

“I sensed he may have occasionally strayed in some of his past relationships. It was something I felt but ignored, a rent in the fabric of an otherwise splendid garment I thought I could mend. I thought I could live with it—I thought, yes and I admit it, that I would be different. That at the very least, middle age and children would slow him down; however, they seemed to accelerate his pace.”

“I should have known then it wasn´t nothing, as he called it. But I was eight months pregnant. No sense closing the barn door now, or so I thought. I swallowed the nothing, straightaway after the usual tears and denial.”

“The abandonment came, and now this shabby bacchanal.”

“People told me not to get married; I didn´t listen. No one ever listens, it seems to me now. Perhaps people should stop trying to communicate. N was not a communicator; early on, I´d insisted on communication. Now I see his point acutely. I would love to have him back to not communicate with me. I would never ask for communication again, I would simply go elsewhere for the deep fish. Also, I´m not at all sure I want to hear what he has to say in this new vista. This works out well.”

“Flannel shirts should be outlawed for ex husbands; I realize this now. Flannel shirts are to women what crotchless panties are to men.”

“I think: I would like to take N back to a story right now, like a rake. I would say, "Oh, this rake is uneven. Do you have any where the tines go straight across?" I would like to do a straight exchange. But there are things that cannot be returned. Errant husbands are one of them. Wives are not. Wives can be exchanged; I have always known this.”

“This is much worse than losing a cat. You do not wish the cat dead, for example, after the first two days. You still love the cat and presumably the cat still loves you, or some variation of love that may in fact be dependence and even indifference.”

“Such silence has an actual sound, the sound of disappearance.”

“It had all seemed as inevitable as sunset. Instead it was the beauty of the sun glinting upon the scythe.”

“I saw my reflection in their eyes, but not the men themselves, not clearly. This preserved the idea that all intelligent and even vaguely attractive men were essentially good. Delusion detest focus and romance provides the veil.”

“Wonderful; such an active word——to be full of wonder.”

“Delusion detests focus and romance provides the veil.”

“The whole world seems tilted, my inner ear displaced by a hole where my spouse used to be.”

“Already things are changing; it´s starting with small shit but oh it´s starting, the change, the irrevocable, impossible change.”

“This people know where their husbands are. I would like to vomit. I would like to vomit my soul out.”

“Why is edamame always ready to expire? It´s so urgent for a vegetable. Edamame. It sounds like an assisted form of suicide. Is there an advertising concept in this?”

“Bushwhacked, I examine my hands. Same hands. Rings still there but no longer valid.”

“I have a new mantra, which I chant softly to myself: "Oh My God Oh My God.”

“Any way I slice reality it comes out poorly, and I feel an urge to not exist, something I have never felt before; and now here it comes with conviction, almost panic. I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.”

“I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.”

“My mind floats like ash. I blame myself most cruelly.”

“My mother is a firm believer in the long pause, useful in interrogations, proclamations of truth, and the occasional cutting dead of someone without their knowing it.”

“Someone who can make things happen must be alerted.”

“I am not ready to think of him as either insane or evil, to consider in full how I could love and have a child with such a person. I am not ready to think about anything, except ways in which this may still be averted.”

“Irrationally, I think, Will You Marry Me? Four words. I Want a Divorce. Four words. I would like time to count the letters as well, but there is not time.”

“I am going insane. Yes. That is what´s happening. Good. Insane.”

“A heart can stop beating for a while, one can still live.”

“The real genesis is forbidden to me, vis-à-vis N´s inability to confess even the mildest transgressions.”