You Think Divorce Means Something to Me?

I am on my right-side, ear to the concrete, nose to nose with the man that I love, crying enough tears to make the pacific swell up with jealousy. He loves me in the way that most men know how, carelessly with little thoughts of what it means and what loving me calls for. I’ve laid here in the smoldering Texas heat for hours contemplating a question that means nothing to either of us: Should we divorce? Its more trivial of a question than you may think because what difference does stripping the title of our love make? I think we should focus our energy elsewhere and he’s exasperated because he thinks this matters. He thinks that disassociating our titles of husband and wife will relieve him of his burden. He thinks that the dissolution of our marriage will be what stops his bleeding and what strips him of his awkward responsibility to know love and approach it relentlessly through all his aversions and apprehensions.

We’re both in pain but mines free for the world to see and he wants me to get up off this ground to assuage appearances. He wants me to go quietly but my rage tells me to make a fool enough of us both because at least the world could see what God knows, that he is a man with infinite “love” for other women and none for himself, least of all me. He thinks I’m grieving and gnashing my teeth because I want to be a wife, Ha! What does it mean to me to wash your clothes, clean your house, make your food, and carry your weak seed that may never bring forth life or that may take my own. These things, this responsibility, this world of taking care of a man, I can do without. It was the loss of my hope that caused me to lay down in the driveway and cry inconsolably. It was the realization that my pride was what caused this, that my love was haughty enough to see a loveless man and think that anything else other than that emptiness could inhabit him. I tried to play God and I was the jester on the stage for the ethereal being who must’ve laughed at my foolishness a thousand times over.

I knew he was bleeding out from the way his walk fainted around his mother, the way his talk never carried congruency or conviction; The way he never stuck to anything he was committed to; the way his heart never committed to me even when we agreed to marry. I remember laying on my right side in the bed searching through his eyes in a way he could never do with mine and thinking I’m going to love this man till he is full, but that day never came. Now he has come to me asking of divorce when the question should be, why can’t you love? and who better than me?

Answer this question that means so much, that tells all. That uncovers your wounds that you’ve hidden in this grandiose home with the white picket fence that you never really wanted. Tell me of your pain, of needing something that you just could not give of yourself. Tell me of your want for these women, your bottomless pit of your hypersexuality, the reason no matter how many times you empty your seed into this world you never go flaccid. Nothing is ever good enough for you because your bleeding and all you can do is take. You are an ungiving life force and I emptied myself for you and to what end? Answer me this: Is it a divorce you want or is it the unburdening of watching the woman who gave you everything in the deteriorated state you pushed her to. Is it the emptiness you’re trying to escape? The mirror of my emptiness making it hard for you to deny your own. Even now I can’t resist my compassion, so I delicately lift myself up taking all the energy I have left. Even now you still fail to offer your help. I walk into a home that belongs to you and I give you your answer “Yes…”