The first morning without him, I swear to god I woke up crying. My pillow was wet, at any rate, and instead of flipping it over or changing the pillowcase, I rolled out of bed and let myself land heavily on the floor. Even if we handle it as well as possible, I thought, it’s still going to be terrible. Even though we were going to be well-behaved exes, the type who didn’t gossip about each other, or have sex with that one coworker the other’s always been jealous of, or post vindictive thirst traps on social media, or tweet excessively about our exciting new lives as single people, it was still going to feel awful for years, possibly forever. It certainly felt that way now.
It was important to me that we have a Good Divorce. As we’d packed his clothes away, we’d agreed that handling whatever came next with kindness would be a nice way to honor what we meant to each other （or had meant）。 We’d composed a little speech to say to friends—“we just grew in different directions”—that was true, but also meaningless, and promised to stay in touch—for the first while, anyway. He’d been gone twenty-four hours, and we’d both checked in a few times already via text, variations on how are you and i’m sorry it’s like this and have you told your parents. In time, I could see us being the type of exes who went to each other’s birthday parties, stayed for a tasteful number of drinks, hugged the new partner, and left before things got messy. But for now I couldn’t see anything, except how badly we’d fucked it up, how quiet the apartment was without him, and how few plans I had for the weekend.
I stayed on the floor until mid-afternoon. It didn’t feel great, but it was the kind of thing you were supposed to do when your marriage fell apart. In the movies, when you get divorced you lie down on the floor, and then you get drunk, and then you pick yourself up by the sweater shawl and learn to love yourself again at a beach house rented from a charming and handsome older man whose first wife died, and although he clearly still loves her in a respectful way, he feels like he might be ready to move on, like the two of you might help each other heal. In the movies, when you get divorced you have a big fight with lawyers, and it’s very painful because the children resent you and you can’t decide who gets the house—the big, beautiful house you spent years decorating together, into which you have poured your life’s savings and where you raised several children or at least one sizable dog. In the movies, you are Diane Lane, or Keaton, or possibly Kruger, a beautiful middle-aged Diane who is her own boss and knows about the good kind of white wine. Usually, you do not continue living with your ex for weeks because you can’t make the rent on your dusty one-bedroom apartment alone. Generally, you are not a glorified research assistant and an advertising copywriter, respectively, whose most important shared financial asset is your one friend who always gets free phones from work. Certainly, you are not supposed to be twenty-eight years old and actively planning a birthday party with the dress code “Jimmy Buffett sluts.”
But there I was, semi-prone, texting the group chat about how much a banner reading Parrothead Pussy would cost, and whether a margarita-flavored cake was within the scope of Clive’s baking abilities. It was widely agreed that he could handle it, and not only that but it was surely something his enemy, a handsome television chef who had recently taught viewers how to “make” corn on the cob, could not achieve. Further, Amirah had found a party bus that had wipe-clean seating inside: it seems like it’s probably used for some kind of bang-bus scenario rather than birthday parties normally, but it’s cheaper than the other one by almost $100 . . . Lauren, whose birthday it was, wrote back: maybe we don’t think about it too much and spend the extra cash on booze? The rest of us agreed.
The group chat comprised my four closest friends from university: Amirah, a lightly frazzled, emotionally turbulent nurse I had met in residence halls; Clive, a large and elegant gay man who was always describing himself as “chaotic” for doing normal things like paying for cabs in cash; and two Laurens—one who cried at everything and another who maintained she had cried only once in her entire life, when McDonald’s stopped doing pizza. For simplicity’s sake, we called the former “Emotional Lauren.”
I had not confessed to the group chat that Jon had left. They knew we were considering separation—that things had not been great lately—but I couldn’t bring myself to type the words he’s gone. I think part of me assumed we would get back together, even after we agreed he’d go, even after everything. I couldn’t envision it lasting, this time apart. Who would I complain to about the speed of the wifi? What would he do when he needed to remember his mom’s birthday? By whom would I run every single decision I made every day of my life? What about Sundays, what would we do? I assumed he would eventually come back and we’d both say, that was exhausting, ha, ha, and then we’d get stoned and watch The Great British Bake Off, an activity that constitutes, as far as I can tell, a full 60 percent of all marriages.
I had also not told them because it felt unbelievably stupid. It is hard to explain exactly how mortifying it is to have had a wedding when your marriage ends almost instantly thereafter. The relationship had been longer than the marriage—much longer—but so what? To have that all-eyes-on-you, congratulations-on-your-big-moment, till-death-do-you-part day, with its attendant preparation and fights with family and guest list issues and thousands of dollars turn out to simply have been a very expensive Tinder photoshoot for your friends is . . . well, it’s not ideal. And you don’t even get to use the photos for Tinder yourself, first, because you do not know how Tinder works, and second, because you are wearing a wedding dress in all of them.
Instead of confessing, I entertained: telling stories about funny dogs I’d seen, or a recent medical appointment where I’d taunted my doctor with tales of my healthy, active lifestyle as she blinked confusedly and tapped the orange-to-red section of the BMI chart on her clipboard. don’t get Maggie started on BMI, wrote Lauren. we’ll be here all night. Clive told us he’d recently decided that it really stood for “Beautiful Man Index,” which made sense, because his was so high. Emotional Lauren said she’d heard a podcast recently that would change our lives. Amirah sent a link to a video of a seagull shoplifting, and then we were off, riffing about marine animal gangs, gossiping about acquaintances, and complaining with equal vigor about real injustices in the world and the corniness of a Toronto micro-celebrity’s social media presence.
Eventually, I knew, I would have to tell them, but I was waiting until I found the right opening. I couldn’t face their questions before I had the answers myself. Was I ready to be single again? Where would I live? What was I going to do about money? I had some money, sure, but Jon had lots of it—from his job, his family, his savvy financial habits. He knew how to save and how to invest and how not to spend a long-awaited freelance check on risky crop tops or a new kind of fancy cat food. He had subsidized my rent and paid for our groceries, and when we went on holidays, he’d pay for everything except my flight, which I was “allowed” to pay for the way children who clear their plates at Thanksgiving “help” with the dishes. A few weeks before our wedding, I’d joked that I was running out of time to get him to sign that prenup; what if we split and he took me for everything I was worth? He told me I could keep my eighty dollars. （That used to be a funny story.）