Hello, my former husband. Perhaps these words will never reach your eyes, and perhaps it matters not. In the quiet of memory everything has already been said; only later do we look back at youthful storms through a completely different lens.
It has been twenty years since we signed the papers that ended us. I can still taste that day in the courtroom: the judge urging us to pause, to consider before answering, reminding us of our fourteenyearold daughter. I was stonecold. Separate us, quickly, and let us go our own ways! I said. You sat mute, neither agreeing nor dissenting, and the gavel fell. From that moment the family dissolved, our lives slipped onto parallel tracks, and we became strangers who no longer spoke. Why? There was nothing left to share.
And then there was our daughter, Poppy, bewildered at the sudden emptiness. Why are Mum and Dad not together? she asked. There had never been a quarrel, no harsh words, only laughter, togetherness, the kind of happiness that felt like sunshine on a summers day.
You never confessed love aloud; it did not need a declaration. It lived in your eyes, in the quiet deeds you performed, in the odd little gifts you always presented, each souvenir carefully chosen with meaning. I remember New Years Eve when you hung a funny plush angelwhere you had found it, I never learnedon the spruce. As the clock struck midnight you whispered, May this little angel be a symbol of our love. That tiny guardian swayed above the front door for every year that followed, moving each Christmas from the mantel to the tree, as if protecting our joy. It seemed to work, at least for a while.
Then I fell, headlong, into a storm of black passionraging, scorching, a devilish enchantment that consumed everything in its path. My lover was already married, with two daughters of his own. We stepped over every rule, every soul. My husband, his wife, our childrenall suffered in unbearable silence while we, wrapped in sin, saw only the blaze of our desire.
After half a year of that madness, clarity crashed upon me like a cold tide. Lord, I thought, how different we are! Like yes and nowhat have I done?
The same dream haunted me night after night: I tried to reach my house, but a thick, sucking mud encircled it, pulling me back as I struggled forward. The house receded further, slipping away. When I finally clawed my way out of that pit of sin, I found youmy other halfalready settled into a new family. I understood, without judgment. Everyone craves love, steadiness, peace. Much water has flowed since then.
Youth, a daughter, a granddaughterthat is the only thread that still ties us, Mark. Is it not enough? Our destinies have simply taken different lanes.
Soon the New Year will come again. I will hang our angel once more upon the spruce; it has survived the years, though its wings have slipped away.
