This is what I'm thinking about at the Aroma café closest to the rabbinical court. My parents are already gone, hers have been with her for a long time too. The only thing I wanted was to ask her for a farewell embrace, one last drop of oxytocin of the finest kind I've ever encountered. A drop that might sustain me a decade forward against the trolling of the years to come. She wouldn't have obliged — she would have made that surprised, strange face she makes when I ask for the thing she wants most in the world. But nobody parts with a farewell hug after ending a marriage with three children. They've already managed to make it clear to everyone that this is a tragedy. But people embrace in tragedies too, like in mourning or something — yet they've also managed to make it clear that divorce is a grief that demands fierce hatred. If you love someone you don't divorce them, so declares a heavenly voice, and everyone answers amen.
Maybe she wouldn't have wanted the hug. Maybe it wouldn't have given her oxytocin but rather a bucket of bitter cortisol. I wish I knew what she wanted. Her desire was always something you had to sculpt in order to reveal or create. In any case, now she's with her parents — shhhh — she chose them so she could break free from my impossibly complicated spell. How can you love so deeply a man so different, who loves so fiercely yet wants other women so badly, who refuses to isolate himself like a normal man and grant her the essential human peace a woman needs, yet also refuses to surrender fully to monogamy? What a poison of a man, what a dangerous enchantment — a wicked existence of a genuinely chemical-psychological compound.
I wish I were capable of cheating on the woman I love so deeply. It might have bought us many more years of love, perhaps. I wish I were at least capable of surrendering to her completely. Of ignoring the goddamn Orthodox childhood that turned my adolescent hormones into a pepper up the ass that never burns enough. Of ignoring my growth as a man who learns, reads, and explores the world. Of ignoring the cursed biology of losing that limerent excitement — that stupor at the start of a relationship. I wish I were completely bald instead of growing this defiant black forelock, I wish I were fat, devoid of text, devoid of sensitivity, poor — something that would make it clear to those outside that my game is rigged. I'd be sipping soup with her and assuring her the world doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned; she'd understand through my big belly and not know whether to be moved by my gesture. I imagine the children's laughter in the garden. The little one playing ball, debating whether to focus on goalkeeper techniques or defense to stabilize his standing at school. I'd be teaching him dirty tricks to win every situation and turning him into a social joker by the next day. He'd gaze at me with the eyes of a beautiful wonder-child looking at his godlike father. The father who is now suddenly divorcing Mom and transforming from a god into a creature under a giant question mark — maybe he loves, and maybe he'll never forgive him. I imagine Rachel reading me the poem she wrote five years ago in second grade — fuck, I remember that poem by heart. Everyone in our house knows it by heart. Nobody fully understands its meaning, but it casts a spell that compels you to memorize every word immediately:
A loving heart
A heart not loving
And above all, loving
Because if it doesn't love
Trouble bound tight in the heart
I'm supposed to be the poet in this house, but I don't have a poem that makes me cry like this. It's a capsule that manages to brew fresh coffee every time. This time I hope she'll keep loving my heart — the one that doesn't love Mom. Nobody wants trouble bound tight in their heart. I imagine the oldest, who already knows to tell me before dance festivals, "Dad, remember Mom is here waiting for you — sleep in a room only with boys." Her gaze is so simple and deep and beautiful. I raised her beautifully — religious, monogamous, a tribute to her mother. Who also gazes with a look that could demolish a nuclear reactor. At this point I'm laughing, taking a half-breath swig like every villain keenly aware of himself, knowing I'm an expired product that Mom consumed and will give her stomachaches for life. One day I'll remember this moment, maybe I'll read this text. I'll think I was such a hopeless, inflated megalomaniac who destroyed the life fate had granted him and annihilated the last drops of love remaining in the bucket — emptied of the love he was born into. A moment later I might swallow something, perhaps. Maybe I'll read it and say wow, what strength it took to leave such a wondrous woman in order not to sink into the depths and drag the whole ship down with you — and then smile with pride at the energy I gained from freedom. Maybe I won't remember this and won't read it at all, sucked into a vortex of survival needs with no time for anything. Maybe I'll be a millionaire bartender in some European beer hall trying to find satisfaction in mood-matched drinks that land perfectly on the type of wink, convinced this is the absolute peak life can offer him after that period.
Divorce taught me that the most important skill in life is the ability to deconstruct a narrative that no longer serves you and rebuild one that does. That practice has a name: narrative engineering.
