A lot less bolder

“Now sweet sixteen’s turned thirty-one, get to feeling weary when the work day’s done….”

Those lyrics opened a short story I wrote in high school.

The story was about a woman who found her life so unbearable that she packed her bags, carefully placed them into the trunk of her car and drove away from her husband and children. At the conclusion of that story, the woman returned home before anyone had even noticed she’d left.

That story, along with several others,  now resides in a box, placed carefully in the trunk of my car on day a couple of months ago.  They remain there because I am not yet ready to unpack all the bits of my life I saw fit to carry with me when I left.

Turns out I wrote my own future in that wreck of short story. After a couple of attempts to live out those words written in the looping script of my eighteen year old self, I finally broke free of the gravitational pull of security and drove away.

My marriage, that once seemingly indestructible thing, finally gave way to the slow, steady erosion of time and dysfunction. Lovers of symmetry, we gave ourselves a final divorce hearing on our 25th wedding anniversary. Contrarians to the end, we had no use for the tradition of silver on that day. No, we went with paper and ink, signatures on the line.

Let it be Decreed and all that. Dissolved like sugar. The solution was dissolution.