The furniture was gone. And only the promise of empty space stared back at me. It was the promise of empty space that had beckoned me to Utah six and a half years earlier. The naked sky offered me the possibility to do anything and be anyone, and the silent mountain sentinels assented to shield [...]
A marriage certificate. “I do.” “I do.” It seems simple at the time, but of course it isn’t. And what happens in the meantime surely contributes to that inflated word count at the end. Years of talking to, at, past each other. The good, the bad, the miscommunicated. The beginning of the end: circumlocution, the talking around the problem, the denial that anything is wrong. The acknowledgement that things are very, very wrong. A flurry of words, pleas, begging. And finally: silence, and a legal process that stands in for resolution.
