CINQ

Today marks five years since I spoke those words aloud—what I wanted, a divorce. Time is a motherfucker. It feels like another life, so distant in the rear-view mirror I can barely make out its blurred contours. Yet simultaneously, it’s like yesterday and I can feel a breath still caught in my throat. Five years. Half a decade, and tears still rise unbidden when I think of losing that imagined future, that version of what I believed we were. What am I mourning? What am I celebrating? The geography between then and now—where do I stand on this altered map?

The other night, at a small dinner party in the home of friends married over twenty years, I became an accidental observer. Our children have grown up together, we've shared vacations and countless evenings like this one—I know this couple's rhythms well. From across the room, I watched them move through their kitchen choreography, preparing final touches for the table. The subtle cues between them—an exchange perfected through countless repetitions. My chest tightened with recognition and loss. I will never know that particular intimacy, the kind that requires decades to cultivate, that grows from shared midnight feedings and school trips from building something together year by patient year. I am past that season of life where such a future remains possible. The arithmetic is unforgiving. I exist now on the other side of those building years.

This realization carries a profound sadness—not for what I lost, but for what I never possessed. Even in my marriage, those years of true partnership, of shared responsibility, never existed. Their absence was precisely why I left. I can also recognize the delight, wonder and joy in all the new and unknown ways to walk through this chapter. I don’t see my life in a conventional construct anymore. My romantic life, my friendships and my future are all by my own choosing and how those things work, for me alone.

Last Mother's Day delivered a sharper ache. My sons were with their father for his Sunday morning visit, and rather than disrupt routine for sentiment, I let the schedule stand. I found myself at my friend's home, unprepared for the scene that unfolded—her family celebrating her role as mother with the lazy Sunday-in-the -sun devotion she deserved. Cards, flowers, breakfast in the garden, her teens talking over one another. She is, indeed, a remarkable mother and wife. I love this family deeply.

I also felt hollowed by grief.

Later, I understood: my sorrow wasn't about missing Mother's Day flowers from my children. It was about having chosen a partner incapable of stepping outside his own rigid beliefs ("it's a stupid manufactured holiday") long enough to model for our children that their mother was worthy of celebration.

These five years have been an education in growing, grieving, mourning, questioning. I carry regrets—mostly about how the divorce unfolded, though I recognize this wisdom only in hindsight's harsh light. Had I known then what I understand now, I would have walked away and surrendered everything without negotiation. I wanted only one thing: OUT. What clouded my vision were three crucial misunderstandings:

First, he refused to participate in any meaningful conversation. You cannot negotiate with a mirror—every proposal returned as rejection without counter-offer, like shouting into a wind tunnel and receiving only the slap of your own voice.

Second, I couldn't fathom the system's capacity for injustice.

Third, I believed—foolishly—that the magnitude of his losses would transform him, force some miraculous evolution into a different man. Instead, he remained exactly who he had always been. Who, then, was the naive one?

These five years have allowed me to reconstruct myself, to examine who I want to become. I focus inward now, cataloguing my own character defects, asking: How do I heal from this? How do I move forward without repeating these patterns? The work isn't easy, but it carries its own rewards. Without that prolonged, brutal divorce, I wonder if I would have embarked on this journey of self-excavation. Pain, it seems, is the most demanding teacher.

For the next five years, I seek more joy. More stillness, more moments of genuine calm. I never imagined, five years ago, that this pain would have such staying power, such tenacious roots.

Yet I have moved forward. I have opened my mind and heart in ways I wouldn't trade for anything—profound, transformative ways that have made me more than I was. I know now it's acceptable to glance backward and shed a tear for what was lost or never was. I’ll look back, but I refuse to stare. The future, whatever its shape, waits ahead.