My heart has been questioning a lot lately.
Questioning what was real and what was just an illusion.
I’ve been divorced for almost two years and it makes me so sad that I question every single one of the 25 years of memories I shared with my ex-husband.
I try to remember the good memories, the happy times…but when I do recall them, I am instantly overwhelmed by the thought, “Was that memory even real?” Or — due to the circumstances of our divorce — was he just pretending that time? And that time? And that time?
What an overwhelming and heartbreaking question that is.
To think about every single moment that sticks out in my memory and immediately question if it was real or not.
I remember sitting in an Adirondack rocking chair in front of our town library a few years ago and watching the small children play in the spray fountains, as my son was inside getting some summer tutoring from his favorite teacher. It seemed so long ago that my own children were that young…laughing and playing on similar splash pads.
As I watched the moms chase their children around, I was instantly nostalgic for that time in my kids’ lives…
…and then I remembered.
I remembered that even though they seemed like happy times for me and my rose-colored glasses, those memories weren’t exactly as I recalled them. There was something else happening at the same time that taints those memories.
All of those memories.
That is one of the most devastating things I think about when I reflect back on my marriage. Of course, I am devastated about the effects our divorce could potentially have on our two beautiful children who didn’t ask for this. But the worst part for me personally is wondering what was actually true. What was authentic.
After we were done corralling kids from a splash pad when they were young, was it a happy memory for my ex-husband, too? Or did he immediately go home and email another woman? Or worse yet, was he emailing someone while we were still there, creating happy memories for our children?
It’s almost unbearable to think about. The idea of whether these memories were actually how I recalled them in my mind or not. I know without a doubt that we both always put our children’s experiences first and wanted to give them love and joyful moments. So I don’t question whether or not their memories are real. I only question if my own experience in that moment was how I remembered it.
Or if there are 25 years of memories that are not at all how I remember them because there were emails and other women always lingering in the background.
That suffocating thought has been coming up for me even more so now because I find myself questioning other relationships that have ended since my divorce…and wondering if they were “real” or not.
The first lovely soul who came along after my divorce in a significant way spoke my heart language so clearly and eloquently and forcefully that I thought he couldn’t possibly be real. I wondered if there were actually people out there in the world like this. People who said things like he did — who said he felt like he had stumbled into a whole new section of the bookstore when he met me and how he couldn’t wait to sit on the floor and read every book. For fuck’s sake.
Or my Beautiful Stranger, who took it to a whole new level. Saying all the words and doing all the things. Reading me poetry and writing me poetry and singing to me and swaying with me in the kitchen and talking about consciousness and the books we read about detaching from outcomes.
Who held my hand as we lay in bed, meditating together. (Swoon.)
But those gorgeous hearts and their words that made me shake my head in disbelief? They disappeared. One so quickly and the other so abruptly that I questioned if it ever even happened.
The endings were so jarring that I felt like I got the rug pulled out from under me. One minute, there were over-the-top declarations of love and talk of soul contracts…and the next, my head was spinning and I was left wondering if I had imagined the whole thing because it felt so much like I was in The Twilight Zone.
And now?
Now, I’m in a space where I am questioning everything and everyone who knocks on my proverbial door, asking to be invited in.
And that’s so incredibly unfair to them.
To call them unicorns. To wonder out loud if they are real. To ask them to please tell me if they are real.
Because.
Because 25 years of memories that I’m not sure were ever real…even from the very beginning.
And unicorns that came before, but then disappeared like a magic trick in a cloud of smoke.
Or was it in the swirl of a shot of whiskey…from the $150 bottle still sitting in my pantry? A gift lovingly purchased that I never had the chance to give.
Collateral damage.
Like my fucking heart.