How are you? The drama has certainly subsided from my life - though it's largely just because I don't interact with B at all. It's an odd kind of bitter indifference I feel toward her sometimes - don't know how else to describe it - it's almost like that feeling of having to deal with a mosquito that just doesn't know how uninterested you are in having it around - and having it dig into you for a drop of blood.
After two weeks of hardly any talk with her at all, I've opted to reintroduce hello and goodbye into my half of the exchange when she picks up S2 in the evenings - but she continues to say nothing in return - which I now just see as comically immature and pathetic. It annoys me to have to interact with someone so removed from reality - but I just don't take it personally - and so as soon as I've turned around and stepped away, she's gone from my thoughts.
That said...the specter of our memories still seems to linger and wait for me to wake on some mornings...damn ghosts...why can't memory be more like a mirror? - just reflect what's there rather than hold onto those images, or the shadows of those images, as if they were still tied to some kind of fanciful reality. I suppose some of these hints of memory just have to come out of the boxes that I'm picking through as I toss things out and discard more of the past to make more room for the present. It's not a hard thing to do, to throw things away, but it is a pensive process - since disposing of memories requires the inevitable comparison between what was and what was not...and tethered to that comparison is the frustration of lingering just long enough on what will not be...a frustration that reminds me (a different sort of remembering - since it looks forward, not backward) that lingering on "what will be" still has the risk of transforming me into a pillar of salt. After having spent a decade considering my life based on a shared past with B, I now move forward without a shared past but with amplified (and healthier) sense of the present. I think this shift has helped me become a better father and a better person.
