snow day

Mert calls and tells me school's been canceled because there's a wind chill of thirty below, so I roll over and go back to sleep right after sending the neighbs a text message reading "I have a snow day neener neener neener". Three hours and forty-five minutes later I'm awakened by a knock at the door and there he is, standing there in a very classy new overcoat. He looks extremely handsome, in a cousin sort of way that fails to attract me. He doesn't want to come in, he just says, I'm not doing so well, it's been a long time I know, but right now I'm not doing so well, so here, I'm going to move on all the stuff I said I was going to move on and I'll cut you a check by mid-February, and he hands me a stapled packet of papers and says, see ya, and he's gone. I look at the papers and across the top they say

JUDGMENT OF DIVORCE

which really only means that it's official now but it's like someone just punched me in the stomach, punched a hole in my "new life" or whatever the hell that means. I feel suddenly vile and like the trashiest person ever to have existed and I need to talk to someone, anybody, right now. So I go to call my mom and then I remember she's holding my grandmother's hand in some hospital in St. Augustine Florida, if I still have a grandmother, and I can't do that to her. I'm about to call the neighbs when I get this overwhelming urge never to call him ever again, never return another one of his calls, I don't deserve him, I don't deserve happiness, I should have to suffer more first after all I did wrong, I can't make this man a solution to all my problems but I'm dialing him already more out of momentum and muscle memory than conviction at this point and then I hear his voice mail message and it says

hi, this is (and there's this tiny pause before he says his own name, almost as if he's forgotten it or is considering whether it's safe to reveal his identity or something), you've reached my voicemail, so uh, leave a message

and it's always sounded kind of grouchy before but today I hear it totally differently. Even the recorded sound of his voice starts reminding me that I've got things I want in this world and that I'm not done yet and that damn it, I've reached his voice mail, I've made it this far, so the only thing now is to keep going, leave a message for Pete's sake, and then let myself be called back, let myself be loved, try to be worthy of it today and from now on.

I call Mert back and tell her I'm divorced. She goes, whoo-HOO! and I laugh. We make a date to walk in the snow for as long as we can stand it and when I hang up I reach for my laptop. My dog groans under the covers as I reach across him to accommodate the power cord. I write some stuff down and hit

PUBLISH