The One Thing I Had

I signed the marriage dissolution agreement today.

Like the first time I signed divorce paperwork, I felt nothing.  

I've come a long way since dreaming of him every night and waking up in disbelief and heartache.  I've come nearly all the way in my mind, believing again that I am so much better off and most certainly better than him.  

I saw him on the 4th of this month.  I had made it 6 months without him, and I grow stronger by the day.  I always told him that I could not make it without him, in an effort to reassure him; but it was never true.  He knew it, too.  I was always too strong for him.  And the one before him.  I am unrelenting when it comes to my children.

Yes, it is the hardest time of my whole life just like he said It would be, and I am utterly abandoned but not alone.  I grow strong from the incredible women around me, my mother and my sister.  It was always us.  It will always be us.  And now my children, too.  When I think of that brief time in my life when I felt, completely, in love, I remember that the cost was at my children's expense.  I could never do it.  I never did.  I never will.

He asked it always; he threatened it, really.  What would I do without him?

I still play those conversations in my head: what awful things his family must say, the way he's spun his side of it.  Oh to be a fly on the wall after our mediation when I stormed in with my dark hair and my demands.  And I got everything I asked for, immediately.  My mother said it best, "who exactly does he think he is fucking with?"

Today is our anniversary.  We were married by a Justice of the Peace in our Chuck Taylors on the day the world was supposed to end (again).  It just worked out that I signed the marriage dissolution today.  And still, all these painful things before me, I just kind of felt nothing.

There was a printed email waiting for me after I signed the MDA with all the account information he had that I needed.  I walked to my car and looked it over...he refers to me in it as his soon to be ex-wife.  Yeah, I bet he can't wait.

The one thing I had was that I felt nothing.  But he feels glad.