Remembering the end of a marriage, and the start of something else
Words © Paul Ransom / Main image © Robby Towill
Rewind. Saturday April 17, 2004. Adelaide, South Australia. Autumn. We wake, as ever, in the long-serving marriage bed. Yet this is no ordinary morning. No time for coffee at our favourite local. Instead, terse finality. I gasp for air. You walk down the back stairs and climb into the Daihatsu. There is no pause for ceremony or apology; simply the sound of an engine, and the sight of you backing out the drive. I blink…and you are gone. For good.
Fast forward twenty years. We have been apart longer than we were together. Our marriage seems abstract. Everything once, anecdotes now. Blog fodder.
Back then – lurching, concussed – I wondered how I would make it through the day. Thereafter, in no time, I made it here.
Today, the space between us and ‘us’ is both mundane and astonishing. The landscape of separation is oceanic, like the desert we once drove through in our city slicker car, where the inevitable puncture happened miles from anywhere, on a back road of sharp sided rocks and fine red sand.
Although we made it back to the bitumen that day, our race was run. The distance was already inside us. Only the formal act of leaving remained.
Yet now, far removed, the span of intervening decades and the blank volumes of separate biography collapse at the instance of thought. As though I might answer the door to you, and you might tell me about your day.
It is not that I pine, nor linger in useless nostalgia, but that a kernel of connection still lives, untainted by divorce dramas and divergent life-paths. I cannot say precisely what it is – whether it is a form of love or recognition – but I feel it. An unframed presence. Vague, like whispered melody, yet undeniable.
It is speaking to me now. It wants you to know how much I thank you for being the one to pull the trigger. To say the horrible words out loud. While I hoped, maybe for miracles, you acted; and in doing so, emancipated me. Not from you, or us, but from myself. From cowardice and indecision.
In truth, the Saturday morning drive-off was the coda. Neither of us were happy. Neither wanted what the other wanted. Our college showmance fireworks had long succumbed to the cooling gravities of adult practicality. Jobs, bills, repetition. Warm familiarity lurching towards rote. Thence to the fringes of contempt.
The marriage had served its purpose. The divorce has since served many others.
At first, it was awful. Disorienting. For both of us. We bounced between the distraction of new lovers and the unmissable void of our old life. In turn, we both fled the city of our upbringing, leaving family and friends. Let the bridges burn, we said, and some of them duly did.
Perhaps, unconsciously, we embraced the rupture, accelerating and magnifying it. If our love was once an act of rebellion, our split was the overthrow. Looking back, I suspect we were also addicted to the drama. It was enlivening. Motivating. When we said goodbye that day, it was a form of permission. One we both embraced.
I can say all this publicly because we have long acknowledged it privately. None of this will shock you.
Except perhaps the brute stat. Twenty years. Just like that. Now the old life has blurred to patchy memory. Sometimes it feels as though it happened to someone else. Was that really me?
- But then I recall my complicity. Complacency. I was selfish and immature. (Most likely, I still am.) There was always a dark heart in the body of our love. A wound not healed, merely bandaged. It stalked us and, somehow, we accommodated its trespass. Until even that became intolerable. In hindsight, I feel that our separation was the final act of repudiation. We now live more as we choose and less like they told us to – and their shadow no longer falls upon us.
How strange, the ambiguities of time. One minute, seeming like forever. The next, like nothing at all. It feels like yesterday that you sat next to me at rehearsal. That you let your hair down. That we stood by the waterfall and made our vows. Then, with barely a crease in the fabric of memory, the distance seems impossible. As though we existed in pre-history. Or a dream.
Perhaps this is how the last twenty years went by: like a rolling update, with countless reconfigurations of archive and erasure. Or like a web, mostly space. Indeed, as I sit here today, with 7500kms (and all the rest) between us, I see how the story of self stretches out like a thin archipelago, scattered notes in the diary of time. A light dusting, almost nothing, especially when viewed from a distance.
However, some of my dappled self is the afterglow of you. An archaeological luminosity, like opal. As though, porous, I had let you wash through me and taken in your traces; such that now I am as far from you as the numbing expanses of aging and forgetting, yet as near as the way I fold shirts.
This is where time and other gaps disappear. In reflex. Private choreography. The calibration of radar. In snatches of old songs and disinterred photographs. Sometimes in the quietness.
Twenty years seems surreal because I still make soup like you showed me. And I eat it from bowls we bought together in the mid-90s.
Where did all that time fly? How on Earth did those bright young college sweethearts land here? By what mechanism did we survive the amputating drama of divorce? The answer – if there is such a thing – is not to be found in esoteric pronouncement. Rather, in the simple process of walking. One day became another day. Your first husband became this guy.
In a way, there is nothing to see here. We are two of billions.
If there is any insight to be had, or beauty to behold, it more likely resides in the elegant and egalitarian inevitability of life’s unfolding. There is an awesome ordinariness to this anniversary.
And somewhere, at an unfixed point between everything, the still beating heart of our union. The space we both inhabited, where the strange concoction of ‘us’ was made, like a personalised holy ghost. I write today because that space has never closed up. Because, in a way I cannot precisely explain, the thread of connection remains, uninterrupted by time, distance, and sundry distractions.
Play: Wednesday April 17, 2024. Jeju-si, South Korea. Spring.
This morning – sitting on a bum-numbing stool at a tiny desk in the corner of a hotel room – I could scarcely be further from you. There is nothing here of us. No remnants. Not even an old shirt.
Indeed, I am in another hemisphere. On an island in the Yellow Sea. In an old neighbourhood in a regional Korean city. I think of you at home on your patch of land in rural South Australia, with your dogs and your view of the Flinders Ranges, and I contrast it with the grime and grey of time-stained concrete and the musical sound of another language. Worlds apart. Forever ago.
Tears emerge, and an ancient spike of grief ruptures the surface of cool perspective. I feel like drowning, but I know I won’t. I will simply type out the last words of this piece and get on with the rest of my life.
Curiously, the light now is as I remember it then. Gauzy. And the air is soft, thickened by humidity. In the background, another airplane, another journey. Strangers going about their lives. Just like us.
PS: A note on photographs.
The header image is from December 1989, a few weeks before our wedding day. It was taken by a good friend of ours, Robby Towill at the rear of an apartment in suburban Adelaide. The one below is from this morning, a selfie, captured in Room 508 of the Jeju Stay Hotel.
As If You Were Listening 