So here I am on the phone with my friend’s wife, who I now consider more a friend to me than he is, albeit he doesn’t know this (yet), trying to help her save her marriage. Not because I couldn’t save mine, but because his reasoning for wanting to give up on his family was too cheap for me to believe. “I am not in love anymore, “he says to me.  “So get over it, and find the love again”, I say in return. Like I will. Like I can.

Like I am.

Pardon this entry for being so sloppily organized (oxymoron? Probably, yes )and/or for my attempt at trying to cover so many different catastrophes  at one time, but I feel the need to get it all out there.

Case in point number 1: I had a fleeting revelation just the other day that it is not so much that I am not the marrying kind; I am. I love to be, well, in love and loved. I just think that people like to unmarry me. I am great at being that wife. The wife that brings you lunch at work, or drops off your wallet to you when you’ve forgotten it in your other pants and it is now air drying because it was washed with this morning’s laundry, but dry in time for delivery, because after all, I have been up just as early as a working person, just not getting “full-time-job” recognition. I am spectacular at biting my tongue when you’ve had a long day and want to talk about it, don’t want to talk about it, don’t want me to talk. About anything. I can wait, and I will keep waiting, for you to find the words to say what you want to say to me the way you want to say it, even if I have to interpret and decode it to hear the beauty in it before it reaches my right ear, and then floats out of my left. I can sit in silence with you and read, watch your favorite movie with you over a hundred times, and put your Wendy’s fast food on a plate for you so that you don’t have to feel like a bachelor whose worked all day and now has to eat his midnight snack out of a brown paper sack.

I can do these things, not for a, “Hey babe, good job” but because I want to. Because I thrive on making sure you are taken care of, and not after I ensure that I am taken care of first. But maybe because I can count on one hand the amount of times those things have been done for me, but it would only take two of mine so that you didn’t have to lift one finger.

Just because I believe in divorce as an option, doesn’t mean I believed it was for me.

So here we are on the phone, and I am appalled at some of the things I am hearing from him, while simultaneously trying to rationalize his need for “self-discovery, freedom, and truth”. After all, wasn’t I guilty of the same crime almost a year and a half ago? Alas, do as I say, not as I do. I want my friend, his wife, to gain strength from this, without losing her husband. I want him to grow up in te next 43 seconds, give or take, and realize he cannot afford to lose his wife. But who am I to advise? I am in the midst of my own divorce. Does that make me an example of what can happen? Of everything that can be lost? I sincerely hope so.

Then again, look at all that I have gained.

Isn’t ironic the way life spins you around. I see him and I feel like my world is tipped on its axis, yet I haven’t felt this grounded in… maybe ever. When I look at him, there is something in the way our eyes lock. I won’t tell him I love him, and it’s not because I don’t feel it. It’s because I know he knows and, if he were a gambling man, I would bet he feels it, too.

My friends have become the walls that protect me. I finally understand what all of those ridiculous picture frames are about- the ones that say, “My friends are everything to me” or “My girlfriends are the ones who shine the light in my hours of darkness”. Well, that last one I’ve never actually seen on anything or read anywhere, but if I did, I could at least understand the truth in it.

I still wouldn’t buy it, though.

Lately, all of my days are shiny. Sometimes they are so bright I have to squint my eyes, making it difficult to tell if it is in part due to the Miami sunshine or a side effect of the huge smile I couldn’t slap off of my face even if I tried. On the other days, the harder they are, the softer I become, and then the tears fall, glistening my skin so that it’s easy to mistake it for a glow. Nevertheless, I shine.

This is why perception is so tricky.

I am glad to be back. I needed to write again, and I’ve missed it more than it probably has missed me. I have been uprooted so many times in the past 18 months, yet it has helped me plant roots in the perfect spot and now, and maybe for the last time, I feel grounded. I can bend, sway, extend a branch, and even offer shelter. And just in case I ever get the urge, I am high enough to see above everything, knowing that it doesn’t and will not get any better than this, but that only we will. And as I grow upward, I can seefeeLheartOuchtastediscoVerlikE every ounce of what I need in my life, and for the rest of it, without wanting- or needing- to fly away.

My wings are clipped, but the cage has been left open, yet still I stand here absorbing us.