Love and My Ex-Husband’s Vaseline

The tub of Vaseline tumbled off the shelf of the grocery store, grazing the tops of my feet. It was my first morning back home in Todos Santos — a small town in south Baja — after a short trip back to the states. Despite feeling renewed after a break from the late-August heat, I was hungry, and my lips were a bit chapped.

Remembering I had just polished off my very large, well-loved tub of Vaseline the night before, I swooped it up, tossed my usual bounty in the basket alongside it, handed over my pesos and got in my car where I ripped off my mask to tide myself over with a few almonds and, of course, relieve my dry lips.

My ex-husband and I used to always argue about chapstick. In my college years, I was a fan of anything that would make my lips tingle. Carmex? Yes, please. Venom-infused lip gloss to make my lips swell? Absolutely.

He always shook his head, declaring all non-Vaseline lip products devoid of purpose. “They don’t actually hydrate your lips,” he’d protest. “It’s like a lip drug, requiring frequent reapplication. Vaseline actually hydrates your lips.”

Rolling my eyes, I’d apply more venomous lip gloss.

His practicality always felt like a father-like shield from the desires of my inner-world. Despite being an incredibly good man, I never felt fully seen for who I was underneath my bleached-out hair and carefully-applied eyeliner.

An avid saver, he spent a summer reading a book titled How to Get Rich Carefully, while I devoured Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. Our books nestled together on our nightstand where they seemingly tried to determine if they were the perfect yin and yang, or as incompatible as we were.

Having gotten married shortly after graduating college, I’d followed the well-trodden path. I got a good tech job and an apartment in downtown Seattle. We’d grind through the week and reward ourselves with a few blackouts and over-priced brunch on the weekends, where I’d medicate with mimosas to spare myself the discomfort of my well-deserved hangover anxiety.

When I’d start to inquire about the lack of meaning in my life, we’d fumble around potential solutions, until we’d innocently default to purchasing things. First a goldendoodle, then a few lavish vacations. And then, eventually, a house.

Each attempt as unknowing as the last — a desperate search outside of ourselves for something that would make us feel like life had any amount of meaning. We’d argue about solutions to our mutual discontent, not understanding why everything felt so off when we were doing what the world told us was right. I found temporary relief by compulsively taking exercise classes, as he did the same by carefully managing his savings.

Both reasonably healthy habits, but distractions in their own right.

Shortly before my 29th birthday, I left our marriage, accidentally taking his tub of Vaseline with me.

“You know what guys do with Vaseline, right?” my friend inquired on a girls’ trip after my divorce was finalized a few weeks later.

I peered down at the open tub with a big scoop out of the top. It did seem like a longshot that all of that product had gone on his lips, but I shrugged and applied a little anyway.

Suddenly free from the confines of his practicality, I was able to appreciate the purity of what petroleum jelly did to one’s lips. It was nourishing — and granted a surprisingly nice sheen, too.

I took that tub of Vaseline with me everywhere, nearly forgetting where it came from.

It coated my lips when I met a tall, handsome man at a social club a few months later. It was in the suitcase that got drenched in the cabin of the sailboat when said tall man accidentally sailed us into rough waters. And it was in my oversized bag when we professed our love for each other on the bow of the boat I had once shared with my ex-husband on Seattle’s Lake Union.

Nine perfect years older than me, he was a risk-taking entrepreneur, outdoorsman and pseudo spiritual intellectual who seemingly danced through life without attachments to anyone or anything.

With an upbringing far less traditional than my own, he was no stranger to living life on his own accord, always doing what suited him, with little regard for the norms and rules to which I had clung a little too tightly in my past.

My attraction to him was rooted in a desire to be more like him. To care and attach myself to less so I could experience more. As a people-pleasing, confined twenty-something, I wanted to taste liberation and saw him as the ticket to becoming something different than who I was in my marriage.

We spent our mornings meditating and our evenings drinking too much. Our life together was hedonic and big, always pushing the boundaries of our relationship, monogamy and of ourselves. So, when I told the tall man I wanted to leave my marketing career to follow my internal nudge to travel and dabble in entrepreneurship, he was the first to put his things in storage.

With my Vaseline in tow, we grounded ourselves in the healing powers of Bali, watched my brother get married in Salzburg, celebrated my 30th birthday in an Austrian spa, skied and ate pasta in the French alps and, eventually, fell apart in a heap of chaos in an onsen on Japan’s northernmost island.

It was the end of 2020’s winter, and the end of our proverbial summer. Just as COVID was making people question the truth of our world, the truth of our love and ourselves was beginning to surface.

Our love — the unsustainable bigness we had created — had become a drug; a venomous lipgloss I would flippantly smear onto the delicate skin around my mouth just to feel something.

As snow slowly piled on top of our heads and shoulders in the onsen, the tall man surprised me by telling me he was done traveling. That he was done chasing my dream. That he resented me for taking him out of his life.

We spent our final months together quarantined in a small houseboat in Seattle negotiating with ourselves, the universe and later a therapist, all in a desperate attempt to find the once intoxicating flame that had brought us together. The death of our relationship was slow and painful. He criticized my sadness as I tried to regroup personally and professionally in the city I had intentionally left behind. In turn, I lashed out in a haze of resentment for walking away from my dream. After a few too many unforgivable jabs, our relationship fell apart.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the tall man was a perfectly placed bridge. He held me as I grieved all that was my old self and my old life and challenged me to push deeper as I explored myself and the world. Our love wasn’t the kind that could survive something as still as quarantine; it was the kind that had to be chaotic enough to launch me in a new direction. Despite wishing he could save me from the journey I subconsciously knew I needed, it seemed that as soon as I started to find my footing, the bridge gave way.

Knowing I needed to continue, I mustered up the last bit of strength in me and spent the next several months on the road, eventually finding my way to Todos Santos. It was in the stillness and smallness of the beachside town that I slowly learned the freedom and bigness I had been trying to pin myself to could not be granted by a lover or earned through an act of rebellion. I would also never find it as long as I kept searching outside of myself, or, ironically, trying to be anything bigger than myself.

It took the birth and death of both relationships to understand who I am and to overcome the fears keeping me from the life I wanted. And it took the deep solitude of COVID for me to stop drowning my discomfort in activities. It was the arduous work of just being — of sitting — that enabled me to not only love myself, but to find purpose in the purity of who I am.

I’ve never finished a tube of tingly chapstick or lipstick in my life — their colors and textures always felt slightly off — but, as it turns out, I finished my ex-husband’s large tub of Vaseline on the one-year anniversary of my last breakup.

The new tub, now perched on a bathroom shelf where it’s shielded from the Mexican sun, marks the start of a new chapter. One beginning with slightly more nourished lips.