I stopped watching TV and started writing again. I also got divorced once and for all on Sunday.

Letting you go began in that moment when i realised that you were not the lighthouse, you were the rocks I was about to wreck myself against.

I’d resisted walking away. Resisted even admitting to myself that it was a vague possibility. I sat in a bar with one of the strongest, smartest women I have known in my lifetime and shook my head though my tears when she suggested that I start looking after me.
Not only could I not fathom that I couldn’t drag you kicking and screaming through the rip tide of grief, I could not see that I was actually drowning myself in the process.

I guess that’s when I knew. I guess that’s when the stone of fear and regret and loss and panic, that had been sitting in my throat for a year, shaped itself into words and left my mouth, skimming truths, leaving ripples along my carefully constructed surface.
“But if I start moving in that direction, it will spell the end for our marriage.” Feelings are not facts but I was reading from a script that we had been writing since I signed our marriage certificate.

I knew I was about to leave you behind. I couldn’t stay though. Our love had evaporated and left a salty trail or everything that could have been, if things had been different. If you had been stronger, if we’d both been more patient, and the inescapable, insurmountable, excruciating reality, that if she had not had died that night, we would have been different people. In a perfect world, grief ends and people are made more resilient. In a perfect world it takes nothing more than love to make something work. In a perfect world we’d never have known the horrors of divorce. 

Then once I started looking at me, I knew that I could survive this. I knew that I would come out the other end, mostly intact. I also knew that you would not. And I couldn’t stand it. Being pushed away. The silence. The averted eyes. Being held hostage by guilt, in our dark flat with a cat that would not sit on my lap and a husband who ignored me. How could I live like that? How could anyone? And for how long? A month? A year of sorrow? A lifetime of unhappiness?

I guess that’s when in started. In that bar, in the Summer time. And I have been walking away from you ever since. It’s Summer time again where I am and I am still leaving you.
I skim real stone these days, in the stream beside my house. The silence is often broken by the sounds of tractors or sheep or cows or my own voice, singing loud and clear across the field of my belly, finding her tiny ears, filling her tiny heart, a love song that could not exist without that conversation, in a bar, a thousand years ago, a million miles away. I stopped drowning that night and started swimming.
I built my own lighthouse.