The past few days I have been inundated with the number 117. I think I've touched on that number here before, and don't really desire to again right now. I see it every day. But the past few days, it is everywhere I look, each time building on the time before, and I am hard pressed to decipher if this is a golden signal that things are going exactly as they should, or if it is the blinking light saying that something...quick...STOP!...is about to careen everything I know into oblivion. The hour of the day has great influence over which of the two paths I acknowledge.
Matthew and I broke our relationship tonight. Not the marriage part....but the other part, where neither of us could be without knowing the other would always be there. The part where it was best if we renamed our marriage what it actually is. Best friends. I guess the road back to two can not be as smooth as we thought. I guess I should have placed more stock in my gut feelings. I guess I shouldn't have said yes, all the while my brain was silently screaming no. I guess it changes when the list of involved parties starts to dance into itself. I guess, just like I crave on any other platform in my life, everything can always change with this, as well.
I'm lucky that Devin is here right now. His distraction has been exactly what I need. His support has been exactly what I need. On my nights off from the girls, we've taken to getting a drink and laughing hysterically at the chaos that is being a member of our family. he makes fun of my porter and I make fun of his hard lemonade. I'm starting to get it now, that family actually is something good. That they are the people who will always be there. That he is the person that will always be there.
I called him tonight, to talk me down, which ended up just amounting to him sitting on the couch while Matthew and I talked on the back steps, but I kept thinking that he was there, and that so many times over the past year, he could have moved a nanospace to the left, and he wouldn't be here now.
And so on the porch tonight, it became very, very clear that things between M and I are not as they seem. it became very, very clear that the arrangement we came to, and the reasons we used to arrive at it, are not the blueprint for the direction M is heading.
And I'm strangely angry. Maybe it's just now hitting me, or maybe it is hitting me all over again just harder. maybe I am seeing the past ten years together as a solid chunk now; all of the pieces are falling into place; all of the little, tiny, easily overlooked things have rolled into a massive ball of goo, whose core was revealed tonight, and alarmingly void of regret.
And so tomorrow morning, after I drop the girls at school, and my "shift" with them ends, i will not see my house again until Saturday. I will not see my girls, what they are wearing, or eating, or saying. And on Saturday, when I return for my shift, it will be the last time I will do it. They will bounce back and forth, and the two of us will have our own, 95% unrelated lives.
Our old house will be my house. Our old car will be my car. The counter in the kitchen that M refused to help me change, will be changed by me. Just like it would have been anyways.
Saturday afternoon, the door to the last ten years will close for good. I want to be sad. I knw that at some point, I will be sad. or maybe I won't. maybe I've already gone there. Maybe I will jump back to where I was once the anger subsides.
Broken. Caput. Maybe at some point, I'll actually miss him as a friend. I'm near certain it will be quite a while...