Boy meets girl

So, I'm divorced now, for real, for keeps.

I've written plenty about my son. I have not talked about my marriage itself. I feel like telling the story, not ugly, not pretty, just as it was.

On Thanksgiving of 2002, a couple of kids fresh out of boot camp were training to be Marine musicians - clarinetists, specifically. They'd run into each other a few times and seemed to have a rapport, and the guy actually was starting to nurse a little bit of an infatuation with the girl (who is oblivious to that sort of thing), but hadn't ever really talked. He'd asked her to a movie, but she didn't like that movie, and turned him down, because of her obliviousness. It was a comedy of errors that kept them from connecting until that Thanksgiving.

Well, outside the barracks that night, they started, around eight at night, and didn't go to their rooms and to bed until five or so in the morning. It was just one of those nights, one of those connections, that doesn't happen. It was magic; it was getting to stay up all night like a grownup and talk with the rambling enthusiasm of a child all at once.

At ten the next morning the guy got up and threw acorns at the girl's window, because they never traded phone numbers, and he so badly wanted to see her. They talked. They watched a movie. They spent the day together, still discovering.

The next day they got a motel room. Why? Because it's what grownups do, and they were grownups, right? Their time together was sweet and awkward. And their relationship grew, and was more sweet and more awkward, until they decided that they wanted to get married, because that's just what one does when one feels this way. It didn't matter that they spent so much time bickering and fighting, because they connected, and the connection was what mattered, right? They were miserable when they were apart and vacillated between giddiness and misery when together. Marriage would fix it, though.

And then they found out that she was having a baby. Great! It was the best thing ever! Now they would really have a wonderful life together, they and this child-to-be.

They married. They were happy, except for her depression and his casual cruelty. The baby was born and they both adored him and doted on him.

However, they both also hated her newly soft and rounder body, and they both fed off of the other's hatred of it. His casual cruelty started to actually wound, and she started to draw blood back. A new religion was a wonderful learning experience, but couldn't fix their problems. They started to hate each other; their connection started to erode.

He liked men. He wanted to be female. She accepted this without question because she knew their connection had eroded irrevocably, and, just as she could not forgive him for his cruelty, he could not forgive her for giving in so easily. They parted ways. They did not divorce.

She had another child with another man, who went as quickly as he came, and gave over the son they shared because he needed time with his father, too, even if his father was no longer a father, per se, and even if he was staying with his grandparents instead of his father. Circumstances kept her from getting her son until months after it was planned for her to do so, and her son grew more distant from her, and more attached to his grandparents, and, to a lesser extent, his father.

She came to get him but, in the middle of the night, the awkward musician she had loved who had grown into this cruel, engaging man who wanted to be a woman called his parents in the middle of the night. They took her son. She had no money and no transportation, and she was left with the choice of either capitulating to the desires of her still-husband (wife?) and stranding herself and her daughter in the middle of nowhere with no support, or ceding defeat and losing her child to distance.

She stranded herself and her daughter, and stopped being the panicky kid she had been, and became harder, and colder, and lonelier. She was homeless, and then got a place, and worked long hours, early hours, for low pay. She was tired. And he would sometimes come and take her to dinner, or they would still talk about things they liked, because, deep down, they still wanted to be the friends they had started out as and should have stayed in the first place.

Sometimes dreams collapse, and sometimes hard work avails nothing, and hers did just that. She had to flee before everything materially collapsed on her as well, and that she did, because she still had a daughter to think about. Her friend, her still-husband-on-a-technicality, agreed that she would have their son once her life was put back together, that she would come back, and they parted ways again.

When the paperwork came to her months later, when she had rebuilt her life, he was keeping their son. Why? He had the upper hand. He had accepted his manhood now, with all of the terrible aspects it carried, and that meant refusing to give any concessions to the friend-turned-wife-turned-opponent. That meant that her concern for fairness was a weapon to be used against her, and he knew she would concede.

And she did, because it was the only thing to do for everyone involved. It was hard, because both of them, in every interaction, missed the teenager they had connected with, and the connection they had killed in the name of love they were too young and too stupid to understand, much less cultivate and nurture. Sometimes friendship is just friendship.

They should have just stayed friends.