the divorce brief
11/28/18
I'm sitting on the step outside base legal, taking drags on a cigarette.
What is it to drag? One can dress up in drag. To be dragged - well, that fucking hurts. To be the one doing the dragging is to have power.
This cigarette is giving me power - or a kick, or courage, or something - and, at the same time, it's filling my lungs with tar. I also don't feel particularly powerful, sitting here outside the legal office, about to go into a room full of people who will all see prey. They’ll know me from being around, and they might know I’m British, and they’ll think hm, she’s single now, might as well hit on her.
Well, not all of them. But some.
/
The divorce brief was weird. It smelled like a fall candle when I walked in.
Oh, it smells so festive! I commented, with a little exclamation. As in, one exclamation point.
It would have been an exclamation mark in England.
Either way. No one replied.
They had Nickelodeon on the TV while we waited for people to file in. They were all military, all in camis, save for a Navy guy in the khaki and black uniform - what are those clothes called? Charlies?
I recognized a couple of them from GNC. My hands were clammy and I wanted to blow my nose; I tried to wipe it, subtly, on my sleeves, but what I really needed was a good nose blow. I felt sad, down to the bone. There we were, sitting together in silence, all these people with fucked up lives - we have, all of us, exchanged tears and screams and a million cross words with the person that we once loved so much that we married them. Every one of us believed, once upon a time, that that person could give us all the happiness in the world. And now we sit together, each ready to file a stack of paperwork to become Legally Single: single on paper, single on Facebook, free to use Tinder and sniff each other’s butts at will, without judgement. Or, rather: with judgement, but no legal implications.
Cross words. Killian’s been doing a lot of crosswords recently.
The TV switched to Paw Patrol. It was absurd: this band of quiet, stripped individuals, sitting in this stupid office, subjected to kid’s television and the legal team’s sad attempts at festive decor - some limp strings of tinsel and cheap baubles on the plants.
The little clerk led us outside and across the courtyard to another room. The girl with the short hair that I recognized from GNC - she was thin and hispanic looking, with pretty eyes - started talking to a sergeant. He called her brother. I wasn’t sure if it was deliberate.
The room was pitch dark, and they had us sit through a video that was, essentially, a slideshow with a blond lieutenant yammering in the background. I barely heard a word of it, but a few stuck out - community property was the phrase I wrote down.
My whole adult life is community fucking property.
I also noticed that, at the bit with the cool-off period and the graph, they’d made Louisiana purple and, in the key, while all the other colors indicated a period of time, purple just had Louisiana??????? next to it. I wanted to ask why, but no-one else seemed to notice. Or if they did, they didn’t laugh.
At the end I asked what the implications of having a deployed spouse would be. The captain said that, with a summary dissolution, if he decided to halt the process at any point, he could, but that was all. The Navy guy asked if he could still do a summary dissolution if they had kids, and if he had to go to Oregon to see a mediator. The first answer was no, and I don’t remember the second one. I tuned out.
Another reason to be grateful we never had kids, I thought. At least our divorce is easy.
I felt like I was swaying as I walked back to the PX. I didn’t finish my cigarette. I saw Randall in the doorway of the barber shop and showed him the papers in my hand, with the blue words SUMMARY DISSOLUTION stamped right in the center of that top page.
It took him a second.
There was a Marine on the bench next to him, who probably heard our whole conversation. I told Randall that it was okay, that this whole thing was okay, and yes I know it's divorce, but that it was okay. And then I said I had been awake since one, and that I needed coffee. So I went to the Starbucks next door.
The snottiest of the Book Club Wives - the one who sneered when she saw that all I’d brought to drink was wine - was in line at Starbucks. And there were tigers on the holiday gift sets.
I laid the paperwork face down when Jasmine asked for my order. She noticed my ear tattoo for the first time: I am, I am, I am. I fumbled with my backpack to get out of explaining it. Then I sat at the window and stared into space.
This brings us to now. I came to the food court with my laptop, and I wanted to sit with the screen facing a wall so I could write without worrying about some idiot coming up behind me and reading this drivel. And, since I’m here, I got my usual breakfast because - well, fuck it, I meal prepped and forgot my food in the rush to leave.
Meal prepping is just a fancy way of saying leftovers. I can't take credit for that thought. That was a SSgt Gus thought. Killian mentioned it to me more than once, because it was a Funny Work Thing that I thought was funny the first time but got kind of old the second or third time.
What do I notice now? The Pepto commercial with the dancing men in pink, singing about diarrhea. Stacks of Budweiser to my right, and the sign over Walter’s pizza: Here’s to the Heroes.
The Navy dude thought to say cheers to me earlier. I just remembered that.
Cheers, then. Cheers to being back on the other side of the world from Killian, and not having someone to prod at the knot in my back from sleeping at awkward angles.
/
While I was walking up to the PX the other day, I wondered about the phrase head over heels. I've decided I don't like it very much: one, because it's a cliché, but also because what happens if you hit your head on the way down? Concussion? Strokes?
And if you smash it hard enough, all that sludgy brain stuff would come oozing out. And blood - lots and lots of warm, red blood.
Well, at least it makes sense. But it isn't a nice thing to imagine.
