So there I was, knee-deep in grenade pins, and... Wait. Sorry. Different story.
Take 2.
So there I was, elbows-deep in dishwater, Themselves snug a'bed, dog inconveniently resting against the backs of my legs, dishwasher on the fritz yet again, windows open to the humid night air, crickets chirping, when it suddenly came to me -- today is the 17th.
Six months have passed since the "official" date of separation, the date of WAW's filing of her petition.
Which means that, here in Coastal State, when the court opens for business Monday morning, we can get divorced -- theoretically, at any rate, as there is no small number of details yet to be hashed out.
But the "cooling-off" period has run; the cool is off, and the divorce is on.
And it produced not a moment's rue or remorse, not a hiccup nor a skipped heartbeat. No; I've come too far for that.
Instead I had a kind of out-of-body, out-of-time experience, in silent observation of which I poured myself a bootlegged Leinenkugel's (you can take the bloke out of Big Midwestern City, but you can't take the Big Midwestern City out of the bloke) and listened to 2 songs.
The first I played to recapture the past, specifically to recapture D-Day, that awful-terrible-horrible day when I emerged from some highly successful meditation and contemplation in the Fortress of Solitude (that is, the john) to find myself confronted by a WAW who declared simply, "I want a divorce -- I don't love you."
The second I played as a test of my new convictions and to set me on my Path to the Future, whatever that may be.
An odd pairing, "My Funny Valentine" by Miles Davis and "Consider Me Gone" by Sting.
Yes. She dumped me on Valentine's Day. And now she can consider me gone.
