When I did manage to sleep, I would wake up in the middle of the night, groggy and confused. I’d reach across the now-enormous bed, my hands searching for the warm, familiar lump of Jon’s body . . . and feel nothing. Fear would course through me and my eyes would spring open, struggling to adjust in the dark. I’d break into a sweat, confused and scared and a little irked. Had I missed a text? We were supposed to communicate about this stuff! Telling one another when you were going to be home late was one of the main Things of marriage! Then, of course, I would remember.
When this happened, I felt, in order: stupid; sad; disappointed; vindicated when I remembered something similar had happened to Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking; embarrassed again that I’d grasped at this connection to Joan Didion; quietly proud, like maybe there were some similarities; then more sad; and, eventually, tired. But I was not an incredibly chic voice of a generation who had lost her life’s love. I could not even figure out the new pant shape, and my greatest work was an incomplete PhD dissertation about the “lived history of objects” in early modern theater. Even when it was finished, no one would read it. I hadn’t lost my husband, I had left him. Or, rather, I had suggested he leave, and he had taken me up on this incredibly quickly. In many ways it was the last thing we agreed on.
And so our marriage was over, six hundred and eight days after it began. One day we were in love, and the next it had curdled. Suddenly we only had two settings: quiet and exasperated. When we weren’t making light, self-consciously upbeat small talk, we were having hundreds, thousands of arguments, rolling our eyes and sighing and sniping at each other about:
career satisfaction, lack thereof;
emotional labor, definition of;
who had used the last of the coffee;
who had paid the last three hydro bills;
who was really condescending to whom, actually;
whether it’s acceptable, maybe even very normal, to stay up till four a.m. playing video games with angry teenagers in Europe;
our parents, our friends as parents, the specter of us as parents;
possibility of pornography as a feminist enterprise;
relevance of feminist porn argument to one straight man’s Pornhub premium account;
toenails, length and disposal locations of;
whether moving out of Toronto was “giving up”;
“Barcelona,” pronunciation of;
why the bedroom was still purple, we moved in years ago, said we would paint;
that one time he called me an “adjacent professor” by accident, and it was completely innocent, the word being truly very close to “adjunct,” but because I was already so hurt all the time, I took it as a slight about my lack of professional seniority, and because I was hungry and exhausted and premenstrual, I cried about it in public, and because we were sick of each other, we said snide things we didn’t mean and wounded things we did, and the whole thing lasted a full day longer than the four or five seconds it would have taken to correct him and move on, and I never admitted it was my fault, even later when he apologized.
An underwhelming breakup. No affair; no big, blowout moment. Just a series of small fires that we let burn out around us, clutching our coffees like the dog from the internet: this is fine.
And now I was alone on a hot June evening, eating bread and butter in my wedding lingerie because the rest of my underwear was dirty. I sprinkled some salt on a hunk of baguette and said, “divorce,” out loud, to see how it felt or maybe just to be dramatic. I picked at an expensive, lacy wedgie and wondered, as I had almost hourly for the past week or so, if maybe it had all been a huge mistake. It was so easy to move through the world as a pair—splitting the cost of things and sharing big sweaters and having someone to stand in line with at the bank.
Jon and I had recently started to make Couple Friends, going to dinner in groups of four or six to lightly tease each other over small plates, then going home and having pointed sex after deciding that Ben and Esther probably never did it. The couples were all slightly older married people Jon knew from work; he’d keep them like he’d kept our tea towels, and I would never be invited to a casual dinner party again. Right when brussels sprouts were finally having their moment in the sun! I chuckled thinking this, and wished I could text the joke to Jon. I’d already used my daily check-in, but there was nothing more satisfying than making him laugh.
This whole situation had the air of a joke, like any moment now one or both of us would call each other, tears streaming down our cheeks: oh my god, you should have seen your face. Although I hated pranks, Jon loved them. After we got engaged he started doing this thing where he would pretend to die if I left the room. I’d come back to find him sprawled on the couch or slumped over the kitchen table, his dark eyes vacant and lifeless. I told him it creeped me out. He said the outcome of marriage, best case scenario, was one of you finding the other’s corpse. Since women usually outlived their husbands and he took significantly worse care of his body （his words）， it would certainly be me finding him and not the other way around. This way, he reasoned, his death—ostensibly one of the worst moments of my life—would be something funny and shared, an inside joke. No one I told about this ever agreed, but I thought it was sweet.
It is horrible to be sad in the summer.
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Chapter 2
That first month alone passed in a haze. A typical day involved waking up after one, then lying in bed joylessly masturbating while The Last Five Years soundtrack （original off-Broadway cast recording） played in the background. My afternoons consisted mostly of trying to work, then giving up and posting Instagram Stories containing oblique references to my emotional state. At some point in there, I turned twenty-nine.
It was this that had forced me to confess to my friends. As a group we went hard for occasions, and a birthday should have been no exception. We had agreed months ago to celebrate with a trip to Toronto Island’s nude beach, bringing cake and cocktails and nothing else. The chat was deep in discussion about the importance of sunscreen and the merits of various private water taxis when I cracked. need to postpone, I wrote. jon moved out . . . permanently i think? An unbearable few minutes of silence followed, then Clive wrote, be there in thirty.