“I want a divorce.”
It’s all she said as we drove to work that morning, the last day of work before the Thanksgiving holiday. The words hit me hard, harder than they should have maybe… I began to cry and forgot I was driving for a moment but managed to pull off the road to clear myself, to recover myself. She sat there looking at me with disgust and when I went to say something she stopped me with,
“You’re going to make me late, stop being a baby and just fucking drive.”
“Can’t we talk about this, cant we try to work it out, get counseling?” I asked her, and she said, “No, it’s too late for that.” She turned to look out the window and ignored me the rest of the drive in.
I was a wreck the rest of the day, and when work was over, waiting for her to get off was a nightmare, I wanted so bad to talk to her about this to try and find someway to work things out. Everyone at work knew something was wrong but I kept it to myself. When she did get out, and came up to my office she asked that we keep our plans to go to her family for the holiday and not say anything to them, that I should put a smile on and act like nothing had happened. She had already and was talking and joking like she had the day before, like nothing was wrong, like our marriage was perfect.
It had started to snow about midday and had kept snowing all day. It was coming down really hard by the time we left the building and what should have been a 2 hour drive to her families place was hell. I could barely see 3 feet in front of the car and she insisted that “we go tonight”. Every mile was marked by a car in the ditch, or a tractor trailer going by us so fast that it made my car rock and slide on the snow and ice covered road.
She tried hard to keep me off the topic of divorce, and on the effort of driving. Was she afraid I would try to kill us tonight with the car? Or maybe she didn’t care really and just wanted to laugh. She played music, made jokes about the normal things, vampires, zombies, witches. Every word said with a smile, no hint of her demand of me from this morning in her face or words.
I could not bring it up, or tell her how alone I felt right then, all I could do was drive and put on the face she wanted, the one that said everything was ok. It was so painful for me to do, while driving. I managed to get us there by midnight without incident or stopping, 5 hours after we left, 5 hours that felt like 500 years.
I was so utterly exhausted when we arrived that I went strait to bed, she came to bed roughly 4 hours later and was up an hour before me the next day. I felt so weak inside, all I wanted to do was cry but I had to put on a smile and pretend she had not asked for it. No… demanded it.
The next 3 days are a blur, I remember laughing and smiling and talking and enjoying a dinner. Playing games and drinking till 3am, but it all seems like a dream, one in which I am a prisoner and can’t speak. On the second day I felt something in me break; could it have been what was left of my heart? Surely it had broken the day she asked for the divorce?


Every night in bed she would lie next to me, and whisper at me the words “loser, idiot, fool, weakling, baby, worthless fuck…” or was what I was hearing her thoughts? It had to be, you see on the last day there we were in the garage having a smoke and talking with her aunt. Her aunt seemed to know, but said nothing.
I was just standing there listening to them when I heard her call me a fake. I looked up at her and she was looking at me with the hate behind the smile look I had come to know all to well, and the words loser came to me but her mouth did not move, then her aunt said, “Poor fool” but her lips were talking about a car she had just bought…
I must have looked like I saw a ghost because the aunt asked if everything was ok but I could hear her saying “the poor fool is breaking apart… she should just leave him and be done with it…”
I backed away and made some excuse to go back inside, away from them. When we left, the normal hugs were given all around and we pulled away smiling, as soon as we were out of sight of the house she turned cold again and ignored me the whole way back. Listening to music that she knew I didn’t like, just to upset me.
The next few months were hell, she moved in with a friend of hers, and left me alone. But demanded that I come get her every morning to take her to work, I did. By Christmas I had left the house and she had moved back in. the last day of work before the holiday she came to my office and asked if I could drop her off at her aunt’s place. She said it was just a little farther down the road from my mother’s place, and she was right, so I agreed. When we left it started to snow again but not as bad as it had during Thanksgiving.
I had begun to block everything out, and a few people asked if I was blocking people as well, I didn’t think so but I guess I had been. Anyway, we got there and I helped her take her things inside… well to the front door, and I was asked to leave.
As I was pulling away I saw him, he was in the other room while I was there, the man she had left me for, and he was waiting for her at the aunt’s place. And they were kissing. I could hear her, “I hope he sees this”… I had.
The drive to mother’s was hellish. The snow had stopped and the music I was listening to only seemed to loop on songs that had always made me think of her. When I got to ma’s, I was a wreck but had gotten so used to wearing my smiling mask that I said nothing about it right away.
It was late in the night after way to much alcohol and I and my sister were alone that I finally said something… she tried to console me, but I was too far gone, at least I smiled for her so she could sleep soundly. Whether she did or not I never knew. All I know is that I spent the night bawling my heart out, begging the goddess Frigga to make things right, to bring her back to me, that I would be truly faithful if she could just make the hurting stop, to make the pain of losing her go away. It was like that for months, I could not sleep, I was not eating right, the things that brought me happiness before had become hollow and worthless… the only thing that didn’t seem to suffer was my job.
I had always been good at keeping my personal life and my work life separate but in time even those boundaries became blurred and I became a zombie. A year went by and I had fooled myself into thinking I was getting better, I moved into a really nice neighborhood, had begun to enjoy my hobbies again and was going out two, three times a week. But I was still not sleeping. The nightmares were getting worse and I ignored it all. The smiling mask had become a permanent part of my face, my identity.
When I got sick and ended up in the hospital, I had thought I had friends. But as the sickness persisted I found out otherwise. In the beginning everyone was still talking with me, visiting but by the 3rd week, that began to stop. I figured everyone was just busy, I ignored it. I got back to work and though I was missed there, even there something seemed different.
I went about my routine and did what I always did, and did it well. But little things were making me angry, upsetting me… I was getting weaker and more tired all the time. It got to the point that if I didn’t call, I didn’t hear from anyone.
Again I figured everyone was just busy. When I got sick again 5 months later, only four would come see me. My new neighbor worried about me and checked in on me from time to time. She was so sweet and made the silence bearable. Weeks went by and I would not hear from anyone. I was alone at home and would text or email or call everyone I knew… but no one returned any of my inquires.
When I did get someone on the line it felt fake to me, “yeah we will come see you, we should make plans, that would be cool, we miss you too.” But when the line went dead… so did the world outside my four walls it seemed. That was hard for me, painful even, but I had three people that would come see me once a month and two people in another state that would talk to me online, I convinced myself it was enough.
As I got sicker, the contact became less. But one friend saw how bad things were and took me in. It was nice at first but I felt more and more alone… like, if I didn’t try to contact anyone I would disappear or fad away. One day I decided to test everyone, and stopped calling people to see who would call me, who would miss me.
One person locally remembered me enough to come over once every other month when they could, the other was in another state and talked to me online daily, it was enough to keep me going. five months later and its new years, my roommates were away for the holiday, I was at home alone. I was lonely, I felt forgotten… I wanted just to hear someone’s voice.
I called everyone I know, no one answered. I sent a few text messages, no answer. Emails, no replies…The pain I had been blocking for the last two years had caught up to me, it broke through the walls and shattered the mask and I collapsed in on myself. There was no one there, no one cared, I was alone, forgotten. I cried and begged the universe to prove to me that I was not… I made a deal, if just one person calls before midnight, I will keep going.
I called my closest friend in all the world, she had been there for me through everything, she always returned my calls, text, or emails, but tonight… two min to midnight and my phone sounded, it was a text message! My heart leapt and shakily I opened the phone and accessed the text messages. There it was a message from someone! I opened it… I read it… I died inside. It was a message about the phone bill being two days late. The alarm went off, it was midnight, and it was a new year.
I waited; every five min’s trying to reach someone, anyone… I was desperate, I needed to know I was real, that I had not been forgotten, that I was not alone… voice mail every time… I started leaving messages that someone call me… that I was afraid, that I was scared and desperate…
Around 2am the phone did ring, I answered, it was a long time friend, they asked who I was, I told them my name and said they knew who I was, …
“I don’t know you… please stop calling my phone.”



I choked on the words, fighting to breathe, fighting not to break down… but I was too weak after all that had happened. Then another call… the same response… I begged them to not do this, I asked if my ex wife had put them up to this, and they said… they said, “she had been married once to someone that died two years ago, that I needed to get help and leave them alone… that I was sick.”
Why were my friends doing this to me…? I yelled back at them over the phone that I was not dead… that I was just sick and could not get out… they hung up, something about calling the cops.
I went to bed, upset and devastated. How could they believe such a thing? Why were they doing this to me… what had I done to drive them all away? I don’t remember how long after that night that my roommates came in and started packing my stuff up. They ignored me and pretended they did not see me. I screamed at them and they visibly got upset and left the room.
I called my aunt, or I tried too. The phone didn’t work anymore, it had been turned off. I lay in my bed and wondered how things could have gotten so bad, how everything had gone so wrong.
As I lay there, I could hear someone crying somewhere, someone else screaming, but every time I would go out of the room and look for them I couldn’t find anyone, literally. There wasn’t anyone anywhere. The roads were empty, the stores empty, everywhere there was nothing but a cloud covered sky and the sounds of agony, but no sign of whomever was feeling it. Out of fear and loneliness I went back to my room, I lay down and covered my head and tried so hard to block it all out.
When my phone rang, I must have screamed, I felt the house shake and vibrate, I looked at my phone and knew it had been turned off, but it was ringing… at first I couldn’t do anything but stare at it. But it kept ringing, so I picked it up. There were no lights or sign of whom might be calling. I opened it, still no lights no power, but it kept ringing. Afraid, sick, despairing of all things, I threw it across the room and it broke, and mercifully stopped ringing.
It must have been days, weeks, or maybe months later when I sat up and the roommates came in, but they had a priest with them. He was spreading holy water around and saying some prayer… another person entered the room… that’s when I noticed I could not hear the roommates or the priest… but I could hear this person. I screamed and screamed and screamed… I fell to the floor and wept, but none of them seemed to see me, or hear me… save the one Stanger that I could hear.

“Why are you here?”
Her question was simple; so without looking at her I said “I live here”. She Looked at the roommates and said she had made contact. I got up and grabbed the one roommate and shook her, screaming at her that I was there, that I was real and that this was cruel, I wanted to know why everyone was being so mean, why everyone was pretending I didn’t exist.


She was so upset, the stranger demanded that I let her go, that I did not belong here. Defeated I let the roommate go and sat down. For the first time I noticed all my things were boxed up and I was sitting on the floor. My bed was gone. Everything was being moved out of the room in a hurry; where had the priest and the stranger gone?

What was going on?

Then it happened again, I heard my phone begin to ring. It was still lying where I had thrown it, Broken but ringing. I looked up and could still hear the screaming from somewhere outside, the crying from somewhere in the house… I had been so utterly depressed, I had not noticed it was already winter again. Slowly I crawled over to it and picked it up. It continued to ring. Not knowing what to do or think, I pressed the send button… and I heard her voice.
I heard it like I had before, back during that Thanksgiving; I heard her voice in my head rather than over the phone. She was praying.
“I know you’re still there, I hate you. You ruined my life with all your whining, all your clinging, why can’t you let it go. Why can’t you just leave us all alone? Every night I see you curled up in your little hell, withered and forgotten, why can’t you just go away? I thought I was free of you when you died, but no… you had to hold on… you had to keep holding on… tormenting us all. Please just let it go, please go away and leave us alone. I never loved you, why did you have to love me?”
“Hello…?”
The line went dead. I looked around… I blinked and it was a brisk morning, I was getting ready for work, it was the last day of work before Thanksgiving and I and my darling wife were getting ready to go to work. She looked troubled; I asked her if everything was ok, if something was wrong.
“No, everything is just right; I can’t wait till we get to my aunt’s after work today. The sun is shining and the birds are singing. It’s going to be such a perfect day. Today I take control of my life, everything is perfect.”
We headed out, got gas and coffee, we laughed at the station zombies and how they never seemed to notice anyone, just taking the money and going to the next sale.
Halfway to the office, she looked at me, that troubled look on her face.
“Love, something is wrong, what is it? You know we can conquer anything if we do it together” I said, and she replied with, “I want a divorce.”

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