my careless contagion

  December 16, 2016, was the day she came back into my life. In the following two years, I've seen a whirlwind of changes. I was so happy she was back in my life. As of this writing, she is not in my life anymore. Of all the changes I've seen in the last two years, this is the saddest. I thought once we started talking she would never be out of my life. It's okay, though. My life has taught me to live with the lack of things. And it was too good to be true anyway.   There was a change that took place in me on a recent Sunday. I sat alone in my apartment and something broke in me. It was a giving up. It was a letting go. Whatever you want to call it. I realized something that I should have seen before but didn't.  Stepping back and looking at the carnage from two divorces is sobering. If I could have done anything to help any of those in pain, I would have. What I didn't see was that I was perhaps the one most affected, the most destroyed, the most hurt by t...

With any great hurt or disappointment, there are a number of stages one walks through in the aftermath. There is usually some anger, wildly fluctuating feelings of betrayal, etc. The range of emotions can take your breath away. Somewhere in there, you will probably do a "what happened" sort of retrospective. I've been writing these pages in the effort to gain perspective on what the hell went wrong in my life. For all practical purposes, I'm nearing the end of this process, and, I believe for me, the next stage is acceptance.  I have to accept things about my life I'd rather not. But, there is no way to move on until I do. I've accepted the fact that I couldn't save my marriage. There were things in both of us that conspired to destroy it, things I didn't even see until years after the damage was done and all the goodness leaked out. Likewise, I couldn't save any other relationship I've been in, however strong it may have seemed in the ...