For the next two weeks, I was either at the office, or in my bedroom at my parent’s house. My gaming rig was in the cellar, but I didn’t even set it up. I don’t know the clinical definition of depressed, but I’m pretty sure I was the poster child for it.
In a few short weeks, I went from a happily married guy to a twenty-seven-year-old loser living at home with his parents. All I had to do was move a bed into the cellar to complete the transition.
And I hadn’t hit bottom yet.
#
Friday night, three weeks after I moved out, I got a phone call from a friend. Debbie was at a local sports bar, and she was with a guy.
Fuck. It was over.
I cleaned up a bit and drove to the bar. I saw her immediately. Two guys, two girls, at a booth across from the bar. She saw me coming and she looked like a deer caught in headlights. The guy she was with was on the outside so she couldn’t get out of the booth even if she wanted to. I leaned over him and slapped my hand on the table.
“You can have this back,” I said, lifting my hand to reveal my wedding ring lying on the table.
I turned and walked out to face the next phase of my life, the one where I was no longer married to Debbie.
On my way home, I bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Black. I didn’t want to drink all my father’s stash. I didn’t get drunk, I had one tumbler only, about two stiff shots, enough to help me sleep.
Debbie left me a raft of messages again. They were different this time. She said I had the wrong idea, she wasn’t on a date, she was out with a friend and two guys dropped by the table.
For some reason I can’t explain, it came to me why I was so upset, why it didn’t matter to me whether she was on another date or not. What hurt my heart was how she was reacting to the situation. We were separated, our marriage was going down the tubes, and she was out having fun at a bar. I was hardly able to function, and she was out at a fucking bar getting hit on!
“Fucking fuck!” I screamed.
My mother knocked on the door and asked if I was alright.
“Yeah, Mom, I’m OK. I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m just frustrated.”
“It will work out in the end, honey. However it’s meant to be, that’s how it will be.”
Jesus! I love my mother, and she means well, but I didn’t need meaningless platitudes.
‘What did I need?’ I asked myself, and for the first time since I started this mess, I had an answer. I didn’t like it, but it was inescapable. Our marriage was over, so I had to divorce Debbie. I needed out so I could start working on being happy again.
#
I changed my payroll deposit on Monday, and I spoke to a lawyer on Tuesday. I called Debbie on Wednesday night.
She answered and said, “I’m glad you called.”
“Yeah, well… Look, I have some things to tell you.”
“OK.”
“On Friday afternoon, you’re going to be served with divorce papers. If you’re not there, they’ll find you eventually so there’s no use hiding from them. Hiding will just cost me money because they charge for each attempt to serve you.”
“You’re divorcing me? You’re the one who cheated, and you’re divorcing me! Were you ever the man I loved?”
“There’s something else. I transferred some money out of our savings account today. I didn’t take half, just a couple grand to help me pay the first month’s rent and a security deposit on a place of my own. It’s depressing for me to live here, and … yeah. You don’t care about that.”
“I do care,” she said, but I needed to finish, so I kept talking.
“The lease on the apartment is up in six weeks. You have more than enough to pay the rent out of the checking account. I don’t want you to be blindsided, but I’m not depositing my paycheck into the checking account anymore. You have to decide if you are going to stay at the apartment but, of course, I won’t be on the lease anymore.”
I couldn’t resist the little ‘blindsided’ dig. I am not sure she even caught it. It was a petty thing to say, but injured, cornered animals are prone to attack.
“I can’t believe you’re divorcing me. I can’t believe you’re treating this like you have some To-Do list and you need to tick off all the boxes. What about us? What about our marriage? Did you fuck that little bitch just to have an excuse to end us? What the hell, John, what are you doing?”
“Our marriage is over and there are things we need to do. It took a couple years for us to mix our stuff together, and now we have to pull it all back apart.”
“We shouldn’t be talking about leases or bank accounts. We should be talking about how to make things right between us.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to talk about that a month ago, but you decided that going out on dates was more important.”
I hung up and turned off my phone. She wanted to date other people–for fun or to punish me–fine. She wanted to hang out in bars and have guys hit on her, fine. I didn’t want to sit around losing my mind while she did it.