I just read and re-read my last post, the one I’d been bottling up for the better part of the past six months while I dared myself to write it. Now it’s there so… hello, world. I’m 34 years old today, divorced and living in a studio in someone’s backyard in West Berkeley.
Four years ago today I turned 30 with a bang! We rented out the Parlour Room (my choice) and about 80 people from both sides of the pond joined me to celebrate. Julian gave the sweetest toast about how far we had come from our messy days in Bristol through his immigration to America (“worth it for this woman, whom I choose every day, and always”). He spoke with a tug in his voice about our struggles to start a family, but that he knew this year was going to be Our Year!
In the dim fairy lights strung across the patio, with his arm draped around my back, I looked up at the beautiful man Julian had become. The roundness of the face I’d known for nearly 10 years had nearly whittled itself away through early-morning jogs in the Pasadena dawn. He was lean now, slim in his jeans where once I’d kindly poked (okay, not always kindly) at his baby fat, and a trimmed beard now obscured the small cleft in his chin, the one I liked to bother with my little finger. I wore a silver dress I got on sale at Anthropologie, little cap sleeves and neckline trimmed with pink satin rosebuds, and a crown of rosebuds in my hair. I ducked my head a little in something like shame or disbelief that any person could say such words of praise and comfort and hope about me, but I could see the guests gathered before us, beaming at me, and him. The moment is snapped — snip! — in my mind. Perfection. We were so perfect together.
And then we were not. Three years ago today I sat alone at home in my kitchen, in that big house with the five bedrooms and the built-ins and the Aga, flipping through a copy of Vanity Fair and drinking whiskey. Alone, while Julian was in Seattle on business. (“I’m sorry, Mel, I know it’s your birthday but you had such a special one last year, and it’s only a week.”) I was so ashamed to have been left alone by him on my birthday I didn’t tell anyone, didn’t ask anyone to come over.
Oh, I wasn’t really alone, and I didn’t really want anyone to join me. I wasn’t wallowing. I was, as always seemed the case those days, on the phone with Alex, who was in the middle of his own marital disintegration. Tonight’s not the night to tell that story in full. If I can tell it in two nights I’d count it a success. Enough to know now that Alex and Minty — my old roommate from Bristol — had decided that they rubbed well enough along together to get married. Well, that and Alex’s mother was getting worried about the state of the roof in their horrible old house outside of Perth, and while Alex’s salary was helpful in keeping her in gin and outfits from Jaeger, and his sister Fennella supplied with acrylics and canvas and charcoal and scarves, a roof on a 16th century “pile” (as he put it) wasn’t possible that year, even with that year’s bonus. With Minty came access to a little more cash — Alex will absolutely admit that now, but at the time we all accepted it as a good match between two old friends who finally felt a spark. It was a feelgood story of slow burn, rather romantic, we all told ourselves. And when baby Lucy came into this world, well, it was meant to be. Not like for me and Julian, over five years in and no child to hold.
I said I wouldn’t go into it tonight. But three years ago tonight I was telling Alex it was going to be all right, Minty would come home with Lucy this week for sure, even though we’d been having the same conversation for nearly six weeks. It must have been 3am his time, but neither of us cared. We cared only for the connection between us, voices on the phone, sharing our disconnection from those we’d so recently promised to cleave only unto.
A year later, 32. A night with the Jen(n)s and Sean and Mack. Jen and Mack, barely holding on there at that point — Mack walked out at 10 pm to get more vodka and never made it back, but I didn’t really care. I barely drank that night, which was a good thing, because I was so desperately thin and brittle with grief by that point. I was so ruined with pain that every pore of me was conscious of living, of breathing, in out, in out. I reeked of disaster.
Three months before, Julian had told me that Alex and I deserved each other, that there was no room left in “this claustrophobic mess of a marriage” and that he would be living in his new apartment in Downtown LA while the lawyers sorted out who was entitled to what, and how much, and for how long. (I am grateful forever to my father for encouraging me to sign a prenup, which was more generous to me than I might have received otherwise.) “It was always him, wasn’t it? How is anything either of you have done to me over the past dozen years been fair? Why did you let me take you back?”
33. “Your Jesus birthday!” Jenn cracked. We celebrated with wine and smoked salmon and baguettes (“loaves and fishes!”) in the living room of the sterile Burbank apartment I’d rented for myself after the Pasadena house had been sold. I wanted nothing of the stuff I’d collected to fill up my life, so I made do with furniture I could borrow from my parents’ house and the occasional trip to the new Ikea. (God, I didn’t realize how horrible the old one was until the new one opened.) Julian called to check in on me, to wish me well, and while I held it together and bit back my sorrow as we spoke, I crumpled in Jenn’s lap as I hit end on the call.
Alex, up in San Francisco by that point, called as I sobbed and Jenn had to take the first fifteen minutes of the call as I composed myself. He and I couldn’t really talk about Julian much, even then, without crying or shouting. Julian had told me, as we started unravelling, that it was like Alex and I had both repeatedly sent arrows straight for his heart with the unerring aim of skilled twin archers — we knew better than any others how to take him down. You attacked my love for you both, you both fucking did it, and then you did it again, and again.
Now, 34. I started writing this at 7pm, and now Alex is here, fixing me tea in the little blonde-wood kitchenette. I like my little A-frame tucked in the backyard of my landlord’s shambolic Victorian, with its Murphy bed and sleeping alcove for when the Jen(n)s arrive. I like the rain and the food and my job in a bookstore. I like Alex pulling down the bed at night after we’ve pushed away the dinner things, and my morning trips to Highwire Coffee.
Happy birthday to me. Maybe this will be my year. It’s almost midnight. Make a wish.
meandering again 