It was a real blow to learn you couldn’t just have a divorce—there was a waiting period and many forms and some business involving tax returns to wade through first. Further blows from the same meeting included: finding out how much a lawyer cost, bringing a cup of cold water to my lips and missing, and having to show my bank balance to a woman who charged $215 an hour. I told the lawyer, a kind-faced, soft-spoken family friend of a friend called Lori, that I supposed Jon and I could use some of the money we’d been given as wedding presents to cover our various legal fees. She laughed—a short, sharp honk—then grew very serious: “Ah, you’re not joking.”
Lori opened one of several folders as a young woman wearing the kind of pants that are begging to be called “slacks” brought her a coffee. “Thanks, Lindsey,” she said, taking a sip. Lindsey left, grabbing a few folders as she did. From my limited time at the offices of Janson Parker Stevenson, LLP, it seemed that the legal profession was essentially a very sophisticated folder management system. Lori’s walls were lined with shelves displaying certificates and leather-bound books and photographs of smiling children I took to be hers. I shifted in my chair, trying to appear competent and grown up and like I wasn’t wearing a stretched-out tankini top as a bra.
“Well, I suppose that’s one benefit of separating, what is it . . . two years? After the marriage? Less than, oh dear. Well, not to worry,” she said. “You know, they say the average person files for divorce about two years after the first time they think about doing it. Sorry, I don’t know why I said that.”
After the lawyer visit, I spoke to Merris about taking on some extra work. She promised to ask around, though demand for someone with my specific set of skills (reasonably proficient with JSTOR, ability to tell the difference between a long S and minuscule F, almost nothing else) was not, shall we say, through the roof. I reminded her I was also good at making copies of things and tactfully telling undergraduates when it was clear that they had plagiarized their essays from the introductions of easily searchable books on the same subject, and she said she’d see what she could do.
I missed the occasional copywriting work Jon used to wrangle for me, coming up with slogans for running shoes and frozen pizzas and “offering a woman’s perspective” on fiber-packed weight loss cereals. Initially, I’d been annoyed to discover I was alright at this sort of thing, that it felt similar, somehow, to coming up with reasons anyone should look twice at a seventeenth-century play where all five senses went on trial after the concept of language challenged them to decide who was best. In many ways, it was easier to see the value in explaining to women ages thirty-five to sixty-five that with Earth Eve’s fiber-packed weight loss cereal, you’ll be surprised what you gain.
At home alone I ordered Night Burgers, browsed rental listings, and had nightmares about Jon’s parents telling me I was a bad person before morphing into two girls I’d worked with at an ice-cream store the summer after ninth grade. Most days I felt like a wrung-out old dishcloth, but then out of nowhere a good day would take me by surprise. They were rare, but they happened. I would say I was operating at about 98.9 percent long, bad, lonely days, then once in a while, despite the restless sleep and all-beef diet and nights spent sitting directly in the glow of my phone, I would wake up and feel calm—like things would be okay, even if I didn’t know how.
On these mornings I often became what Amirah had started to call “dangerously reflective,” stretching and putting lemon in hot water (to . . . alkalize . . . it?) and going on tearful, meditative walks. I’d been reading a lot of books I’d seen on stylish women’s Instagrams, propped up in the sun next to a crystal. They were full of long, descriptive sentences and whimsical digressions about old movies I had never heard of. Normally I found these books kind of corny—all that vulnerability, all those florid descriptions of sunlight—but these days I couldn’t get enough of them.
I would open one and put a flower on top of it, then take a picture and imagine changing everything about my personality and core friendship group to allow myself to post that image online. Then I would read something like “You are not broken because someone tried to break you” and think, wow, exactly, despite not having even one single life experience to relate to a statement like that. The books were very much the gateway to the creative efforts that followed, and to several other soft blunders besides.
I had become doggedly committed to “taking my broken heart and turning it into art,” mostly via the medium of collage, an activity these books tacitly encouraged. Suddenly all I wanted was to sit on my floor and cut out images about my feelings, to wear a nightgown that looked like a curtain and know things about attachment styles. To this end, I invited the group chat over for a “solstice celebration,” with promises of some kind of moon ceremony.
wasn’t the solstice last week? wrote Emotional Lauren.
daughter of the witches they failed to burn alert!!! texted Amirah.
oh fuck off, said Emotional Lauren.
bring sage please, I wrote.
When they arrived, they found me rummaging through my spice drawer, pulling out anything green. “Turns out smudging is cultural appropriation,” I said. I had found an article. “Maybe we could use herbs de Provence?” It did not bundle well, so we rolled some of it in a paper towel and set it alight in a bowl on the kitchen table.
I sniffed the air. “Smells like . . .”
“Chicken,” said Clive. “Are we having chicken?”
I shook my head. We were having what we always had: a pile of assorted bits.
“Well,” said Lauren. “Very powerful so far. Are we doing anything else? What does this ceremony involve?”
I hadn’t really looked into it, so I improvised, suggesting we all think of something we wanted to let go of and then spit it into the bowl.
“Oh, I don’t want to—” Amirah started, before Emotional Lauren stopped her. Amirah rolled her eyes and spit into the bowl. Dubious eye contact ricocheted through the group, but god bless them, they all did it. I closed my eyes and imagined all of it—my shame and sadness, a petty fantasy I’d had about one of Jon’s female friends falling off her bike—rising up through my body, ready to be expelled. I worked my tongue around my mouth a few times, building up an amount of spit that seemed like enough, then horked it into the bowl. I opened my eyes and confronted an unholy cocktail of singed rosemary, a rubber band, a smoldering paper towel, and the saliva of five adults.
“Actually,” I said, “I think maybe this is incredibly gross?”
My friends agreed. We doused the fire and cleaned the bowl thoroughly, and Emotional Lauren, the light mystic of the group, read everyone’s tarot cards while Clive assembled and then took pictures of an enormous pile of snacks. Lauren cracked a bottle of Lambrusco and told us about a colleague who was crowdfunding to finance a photography series “reclaiming the human ass,” largely via photos of his own. I left the room to grab some ice, and when I came back Amirah had taken my spot on the couch. Without any other sitting furniture in the room, I curled up at her feet like Janet.
“Just take your nudes in your bedroom like the rest of us!” she screamed, then showed us a particularly impressive one she’d sent Tom the other day, which she worried had been ruined by the presence of a half-empty soup bowl in the background. “I don’t want him to think I paused huffing some broccoli and cheddar to take a sexy picture for him,” she said, although that is exactly what she’d done.
We passed our phones around, sharing our favorite naked self-portraiture, reclaiming our human asses together. We all agreed nudes were getting more complicated as our twenties dwindled. Our poses were getting increasingly contorted as we tried to whittle and protrude the right things, no longer content to stand in front of a mirror and let the flash obscure our faces. It was increasingly appealing to leave the bra on.
“I know what you mean,” said Clive. “The other day this guy asked for a pic, and I wanted to do something kind of artful or coy, but I was feeling crappy about my body and couldn’t make it work, so I gave up and sent full hole.”
We consulted Lauren’s colleague’s crowdfunding page and had to admit the man knew his angles. I mentally bookmarked a lying down/side twist pretzel thing he was doing. Lauren said crowdfunding was a “slippery slope,” and that probably we as a species had experienced “all the web series we could ever need about white people doing polyamory,” and that if you weren’t careful someone you went to elementary school with would be asking you for twelve dollars a month to make feminist watercolors. Emotional Lauren said she’d probably buy a feminist watercolor, then we all got distracted because someone we didn’t like had posted a series of bizarre engagement photos on Instagram. A small fight erupted when Lauren pointed out that Amirah’s Tom posts were only a few degrees off the photo set we’d scrolled through, featuring the bride-to-be mostly submerged in a lake, her future husband wading in to rescue her, King Arthur in a polo shirt. After we’d all been unequivocally bitchy for an hour or so, I explained “haha, so what” to the group, with an emphasis on how liberated I was feeling.
“I used to be so preoccupied with what I looked like or what people thought of me,” I said. “But the other day, I went to a coffee shop in old pajamas and last night’s makeup, and when I ran into someone from work, I simply told them I was having a hard time. It was very freeing.” I wrapped a cheese cube in salami and popped it into my mouth. When nobody asked a follow-up question, I continued: “It’s good! It’s like, I don’t need to dig my own grave to know that ultimately, nothing is that important and we all die alone. I don’t know why you guys are being so serious about this. I mean it in like, a fun way.”
My friends looked more skeptical than they had about the spit potion, but I was undaunted. I told them the stakes of being alive had been pleasantly lowered, since nothing could be as disastrous as this breakup, and that I’d been sleeping better—in fact, sleeping often—and eating with less worry about things like nutritional value or whether I’d be exercising later.
I felt pleasantly disconnected from everything around me, as though observing life underwater, which allowed me to take my time before responding to stressors and to fret less about the things that were ultimately insignificant. I was sure this was the way forward and happy to have finally gotten here, even if I had to undergo a traumatic event to do so. Everyone listened carefully, nodding like a group of NPR hosts. Lauren dipped an endive in yogurt, wiped the side of her mouth, and said politely, curiously, “Isn’t that, like, exactly how people describe depression?”
After they left, I piled the dishes in the sink alongside the ones from yesterday and the day before. The night had been mostly wonderful, and it was reassuring to have the house feel full again. I imagined the upstairs neighbors poking each other with excitement: No Kate Bush tonight! And is that . . . the laughter of others? Still, I was frustrated by what Lauren had said about my new outlook. It didn’t feel like depression. It felt like burrowing down in a positive way. The next day, I cleared out the self-help section of the used bookstore down the street, working my way through my purchases with a pen, underlining passages and annotating the margins with !!!s, ????s, and YOU DO NOT NEED TO ASK PERMISSIONs. Everything felt heightened: making tea was a ritual, the time I spent ignoring work emails was sacred, buying a garish lipstick I would never use was an important act of self-care.
Summer carried on. I worked from home and allowed myself to rest and tried almost aggressively to let the soft animal of my body love what it loved, which mostly at that point was potatoes. I spent distracted time with the self-help authors, agreeing furiously with whatever was in front of me and forgetting it moments later. I almost booked a spot on a ten-day silent retreat dozens of times. The collages got weird, and I hung them up around my house, thinking, This is good. I am building a temple to my grief. And then thinking, oh, for god’s sake, but leaving them there anyway. I subscribed to a lot of newsletters about feelings.
One day after some particularly intense decoupage, I looked down and noticed my hands. Noticing Things had become a major pastime of mine. I’d noticed, recently: that coffee was warm, that sunlight was bright, and that I felt sad. This morning, I noticed my hands and had a thought that had become increasingly frequent in recent years: my mother was right. This time, she was right about the hands themselves. They were exactly her hands. The brittle, nubby nails and the too-long-to-be-stubby, too-short-to-be-elegant length of the fingers, the soft knuckles and small palms.
My mother pointed this out often in my teen years, gasping and holding up her hand against mine. “Look at that,” she’d say, as if suddenly remembering that this person in her kitchen was someone she’d made with her own body. “There they are.”
I hadn’t paid much attention to it. I was very busy deciding how to get my hands and the rest of me looking as terrible as possible, using Wite-Out as nail polish and scribbling absolute nonsense all over my arms and palms so that a boy who talked about pop punk too much might one day talk too much about pop punk to me. I hadn’t paid enough attention to that or anything else my mom had said when I was young.
And so, that night, I wrote her an email. It was long and emotional and mostly about our hands. I told her I loved seeing mine and remembering they were hers too—that she had made them and, with her own hands, had raised me and fed me and shaped me into a person. As I wrote it, I imagined her being moved by my honesty, my eloquence and gratitude. I pictured her finishing the email, taking a minute, and thinking, you know, she was more difficult than her sister, but she turned out okay. Finally I know for sure that she understands everything I’ve done for her. I pictured her shedding a single tear. I pictured her looking up the word “inchoate” in a dictionary. I meant everything I said in the email and took pains to express it clearly and with maximum emotional impact.
Maybe this was the hidden blessing of a breakup: not “haha, so what,” but a new tenderness, an opening up. An ability to say the things that hadn’t been said but should have been. Maybe it was all worth it, the disappointment and heartbreak a crash course in sitting in my feelings, observing them without fear. As I’d recently read in a six-thousand-word advice column addressed to a terminally ill woman whose struggle with her impending fate I considered relevant to my current personal tumult, maybe I was sublime right now, walking in the moonlight of my glorious, complicated selfhood. Maybe I was a warrior. At the very least, I was a fucking great daughter. I pressed “send” so full of love and positivity, I felt it must be seeping out of my pores. I breathed deeply and went to sleep, smiling and satisfied.
I woke the next morning to a text from my sister: mom says we have to check on you, apparently you’re having some kind of breakdown.