In which I had entirely too much damned fun at the party, just like I knew I would, but oh holy FUCK my head hurts. And the word of the day is ‘bittersweet.’

I went over to Baby Girl’s yesterday afternoon intending to stay only long enough to firm up our transportation plans to the party, but as we were visiting in her living room a tree limb fell out of the tree she parks under and smashed her car. The morning’s thunderstorms had been past for a couple of hours, the sky was blue, and there was no wind, but a big damn branch decided to drop 30 feet and do at least two thousand dollars worth of damage anyway.

So I stayed to take pictures for her claim and hang out with her while she called her agent, landlord, and the police. Eventually I split for home to shower, then I went back to pick her up… and long story short, I didn’t get out to The Ex’s party until 7:30.

The party was quite well along when we arrived. Uncle L was BBQing up a storm in the bottom level of the barn, one dude was already passed out drunk in The Ex’s truck, tents were going up, and there was a pack of yellow dogs begging partygoers shamelessly for bratwurst. There was power to the barn and a boom box was playing music. The Ex waved at me, and I went to chat with him for a moment. There were friends in from out of town, and I went for a round of hugs. The yellow dogs had to say hi and put their muddy paws on me.

NLW finally got me focused on lemondrops, so she and I and a couple other women snuck into the house to make a batch. The women were asking me left and right where things were and if they could do this or that. I kept saying, “I have no idea where anything is, and I can’t answer questions of permission because I don’t live here!” It was amusing, because as four of us were making lemondrops and the other two were organizing food to take out to the barn, they all kept asking me things anyway – “Are there any serving spoons we can take outside?” “Do you know where a measuring cup is?” “Can I use this pitcher?” – and then giggling once they realized they’d done it again.

It was so strange, so foreign. That room used to be my kitchen… but now I don’t know where anything is. It looks completely different. I’ve never in my life felt so awkward, so very much like a guest. That room and I had no relationship any more, my kitchen of five years.

Aki had made a divorce cake and it was in the fridge. It was a three-tiered chocolate cake with buttercream frosting and blue piping, with Homies arranged on the very top. It was beautiful, even with the silly toys on it. Unfortunately everybody forgot about it and it was never served. (I’m hoping The Ex will bring me some next week when he comes to pick Truck up for work.)

After we’d made our pitcher of lemondrop martinis, I sent basically everyone outside on one pretense or another and took a peek through the house. My goal was to find and take my warez folder – I’m getting sick of not having my software library handy – and to pull the hard drive out of my computer.

When I walked through what had been the living room, it had very few things in it – and basically all of them mine. No couch, no TV, no rug… a practically empty room, with a table in the corner covered in dusty knickknacks.

Upstairs, I glanced into what had been, when I moved out, the master bedroom: now it’s a… living room? There’s a couch in there, the entertainment center, a propane wall heater I’m convinced had never been there before, the end tables. My office chair. Ashtrays: he smokes inside now.

I looked in to what had been my office, and… the room is now a bedroom. He’d moved all of my crap for me (and I’d had a lot of stuff in there). I was both pleased (that he’d done the work for me) and dismayed (that damn near all traces of my having lived there are now erased). I crossed the hall and opened another door: all my stuff had been consolidated and moved into one of the under-construction rooms. I went in and felt around but it was past dusk and the room has no fixtures. From what I could tell in the near-dark, things weren’t badly treated but they’re not packed, just stacked in a room that is, with its lack of drywall or insulation and occasional holes where the siding is missing, nearly open to the elements. I imagine what’s left in the old living room will end up there if The Ex’s organizational spree continues, and soon I’ll just back my jeep up to the steps and load it all out.

Without a flashlight there was no point in even trying to go through anything, it’d been moved and stacked and I didn’t know where anything was. I closed the door and, feeling somehow both lighter and heavier, went outside to join my friends – and the martinis – on the porch.

So he’s changed the house – his house now – to suit him, and he’s made it his. I’m genuinely glad: I can say that with sincerity and even enthusiasm. But – and you knew there’d be a but – the petty part of me can’t help but wonder at his self-reliance. Apparently he’s perfectly capable of having opinions about and implementing changes to his domestic situation, yet no amount of my pleading for help ever got him to do so when I was part of his life… it was just so so sad and painful, so relentlessly obvious, looking into the rooms of what once was my house, that he’ll do for himself out of necessity things he would not do for me out of love.

I knew that, of course – it’s why I left. But still. Look at him do all the things he refused to do for me; look at him do them well.

A small part of me still wants to say, “See that there? See how you’ve made yourself comfortable, how you’ve created a homey space to live in, and how you keep it nice enough? Would you mind telling me, now, what it was exactly that I did or that I lacked that made you withhold all that from me for all those years?”

Actually, as much as it galls me I must be fair: he did do them. At the very end, at least. Our final year, he began to give what I’d pleaded for. But by then I’d quit loving him, and for all his last-ditch efforts I gave nothing back. But he did try. He made a bid to save us, he did, but I was already gone. He was at a loss and in pain. I was distant, nursing old hurts and snarling, rejecting his overtures.

Ah hell, why does it have to be so fucking awful? Did either of us deserve any of this?

On the porch, it rained a little but none of us sitting there were bothered enough by it to move to better cover. We drank the pitcher of martinis and there was much laughing and carrying on. I reveled in old friends and new ones. Tipsiness ensued. Time passed. By the time I left my seat on the porch steps it was well past full dark, and for the rest of the night I wandered from one group to the next and one conversation to another. The whole night is now a series of disconnected images – it’s so dark out there at night, and each scene is bracketed by moments of stumbling around in the dark, giving it all an eerie, disjointed quality in memory. The thread that followed me through nearly every conversation, though, was joy: that it’s not some lofty goal, it’s the very least one should accept. I felt joyful: I’d leaped and landed. I had lost my title and a family and a home, but I’d got myself back. I didn’t live in that crazy old farm house any more, I didn’t have to answer to anyone any more, I had my autonomy and my privacy back. I’d shed all those damn chores. I felt more like myself than I had when I lived there. I’d become happy. So I told people that they shouldn’t stay stuck, they should do the work – especially the work that hurts – and move! Change! Leap.

The Jefferson County Green Band came out and played two sets in the barn; I sat in and sang a couple of songs with them. I was in poor voice because I was partying – yelling, talking, laughing, smoking, drinking – but I had a lot of fun with them and the barn was packed with smiling, dancing people. There were jello shots. Baby Girl left to drive home a friend who’d lost his designated driver to romance.

I wandered. I hugged. I laughed and talked and squealed. I flirted baldly with old friends. I accepted the congratulations of people who said they’d never seen a more amicable breakup, who thought the whole divorce party was just really cool. I laughed awkwardly when an old friend, bitter about love, asked me if I wasn’t just a very poor example of my sex, what with leaving a man intact when I could have utterly ruined him instead. (But haven’t I? Didn’t I break his heart? I didn’t emasculate him, but I did reject his home and his life and ultimately him.)

So I didn’t bother to go into how I’d actually ruined myself, nor how I’d done it before the end rather than after, nor how I’d never wanted anyone ruined in the first place. Sure, it looks amicable, this divorce, and technically it is – we can be in the same room together. But I didn’t leave because I wanted to, I left because I couldn’t not leave. We’re nice to each other now, because well… I can’t speak for him, but I just can’t think of any reason to be cruel now. The pain’s stopped, so there’s nothing to complain about.

I know this about myself: I really don’t want much, not much at all. I’m not ‘high maintenance,’ I’m not greedy, and I’m not unreasonable. Although I do get mad, I’m not a grudge holder, or I wasn’t until I learned to be. I’m flawed, yes, but I’m not impossible to satisfy. And what happened between us was that I didn’t ask for very much but I just couldn’t get it, and so finally I went somewhere else. That’s the whole shape of it. There’s no fault, really. Just two people who couldn’t hear each other well enough to get by.

More than once last night, when asked why The Ex and I were still friendly and not in deep hate, I found myself saying, “I could be mad. I mean, if I wanted to be a victim it’s not like I don’t have plenty to be pissed off about – I could do it if I wanted. And he certainly could as well, because I’m a hideously flawed human being myself, and I left him which makes me the bitch by default. But what’s the point in doing that? Why waste the time? I’d like to see him happy, with someone who fits.”

I ended up coming across as if I were really together, somehow. People kept telling me how awesome my outlook was, ignoring my blatant statements of my own culpability. I happened to be the one to leave, sure, but it’s not like my flaws weren’t half the reason the marriage failed.

I kept not getting sober enough to drive home (which may have been due to the fact that every time I looked at my hand, there was a drink in it), so I kept not leaving the party. Even though it wasn’t ideal weather the rain showers did keep people together near the barn, rather than spread out all over the property, so it made for great socializing. The music was great, the food was great. There were lots of people there, and cars and trucks parked all over the place. There was a bonfire so big it must’ve been clearly visible from space. The Ex was friendly enough to me every time I approached him but I noticed that he’d walk away, after politely standing beside me for a couple of minutes, as if he really didn’t want to be around me. He’d not just walk over to talk to someone else, he’d leave the area altogether. After the third or fourth time it happened I wondered if he was uncomfortable around me, or merely more interested in talking to someone with whom he has something in common, or just suddenly remembering that he was hosting a party all by himself. I wonder if I’m wrong when I think I see pain there.

I was drunk and gregarious and at a giant party. I had involved, convoluted conversations with Bowling Jesus for hours, and then Farmer Doug joined us, and then Blount did, and we had custody of various others as well. I’d been holding court in my jeep for hours when I went back into the barn in the wee hours of the morning. (I think my presence there chased The Ex out, because he left right after I came in and spoke to him. By then his departures were beginning to make me ache a little.) I sat on the floor of the barn and for some reason found myself singing “The Hokey Pokey” with Rockstar while I watched the guys down below dance the steps, grinning and silly. There was hollering and teasing and laughter. I got RP to shake his ass for me. I found another drink.

After awhile, I went back to the jeep and to the guys still hanging out there. “Is that the moon?” I asked, stumbling through the ruts left in the wet grass by various cars and trucks, looking at a lightening of the sky that totally surprised me. “Or is it tomorrow already?” The guys assured me it was, indeed, tomorrow. We carried on awhile longer, chatting and arguing, and Truck joined us. I was tired and then the sun was fully up and I finally decided to leave. I was sober, exhausted, and my feet, which I’d sunk into a couple of muddy ruts, were freezing.

Of course the jeep wouldn’t start, because the doors had been open most of the night and the interior lights had drained the battery, so I went in search of jumper cables. I looked in the honey house where they’d been when I still lived there, but I couldn’t find them. By the time I got back the guys had gotten the jeep started for me and it was warming up.

The divorce party concept was originally a tongue-in-cheek idea of The Ex’s, I think, but it ended up being a real ritual anyway. For me, at least. Perhaps I came away with some closure, or found that the acknowledgment of friends and community made it more real somehow. Despite the impressions I got from talking to his out-of-town friends, who make it sound like he’s just fine, I still fear that The Ex is harboring some hurt and that makes me hurt. I’d wanted to hang out with him just a little, maybe, but he kept slipping away, smiling but going nonetheless, polite and elusive, making me feel like a bull in a china shop.

I don’t know what I would have said anyway. His internal life is no longer any of my business, and I certainly can’t expect to be allowed to reach out to him just to assuage my own vague guilt. I guess I just wanted to get enough time near him to gauge his state, but again, that’s not mine any more.

I probably appeared to be a drunken, shallow bitch who cared not at all about the end of her marriage. I spent the night almost entirely in the company of men, I kissed the Colorado boys shamelessly, I laughed and talked and carried on. I was clearly having a blast, because I was. I love parties, I love friends, I love community. I belonged there… but it was my divorce party, so in truth I was there celebrating the fact that I didn’t belong there.

I rediscovered as I traveled through my feelings that I’d done the right thing, though. I’m grateful as hell to discover it, too – I was afraid for a long time that I was throwing out the one true thing I’d ever get, that I was simply too selfish or flawed or lazy to try hard enough… Today my heart is aching and tender: that was once my home, my husband, my place and my life. Once it would have been my party, my community, my family… but now I’ve moved toward the outside. I’m a guest. I won’t be getting a call for brunch, or to come back out to the farm to help clean up.

That space is no longer mine.

I got into my jeep with my dog, and I left. I drove home at seven in the morning, leaving behind things I wanted, things I didn’t want. Bittersweet is the word of the day.