Final Dissolution

                            August 26th, 2026. I  had it circled on my virtual calendar for months. It was the day I  had waited for, a day that would make me feel lighter, feel relief, feel free. Imagine my surprise when that was not at all how I felt. Those things are not at all how it feels to sever a marriage of thirty one years. Honestly I am at a loss for how to accurately describe the feeling. I  have been married more than half my life, and I  am left to navigate the rest of it as an individual , no partner , no landing place. That looms very dark for me. Today, my marriage was reduced to four squares on a zoom call with a judge who never met either of us. The judge never saw the long life we had together , before it came to this. He was not present in three delivery rooms, or at hospital bedsides, or graduation venues, or countless birthday parties. He never witnessed the struggles of the last decade, of both of us trying to figure out why we could not be happy with each other. He wasn't at the few failed therapy attempts, or in the parking lots we met in late at night to try and see if anything was left for us to salvage. He doesn't know that one of us will return home this afternoon to an empty house full of memories that are imbedded in the walls, floors and ceilings. He doesn't know that the shelter of that family home occassionally feels like an anchor tied to the past.  He doesn't know that the other one of us is going home to a completely different life, with a completely different woman (and I struggle calling her a woman because she has yet to have her frontal lobe fully formed) and a different dog - but his life is basically the same. Sans the woman he just could not choose over his vices. The vices that eventually destroyed us. No, this judge knows none of that. he just sits and listens to me answer a series of questions that my attorney asks ,acknowledges that I  am in agreement to end the marriage and signs a document deeming thirty one years "null and void".  Null and void. I guess that actually sums up how I feel... those are the words I was looking for earlier. So, even though this journey began two years ago, and I could not wait for today I am left sad and, like my marriage, irrevocably broken.