So many marriages end in hissed epithets and abundant cruelty. I've been spared. But, as I read over the papers for divorce yesterday, I was imbued with this overwhelming sadness. Ends are always hard. I wasn't given a choice in the current state of my marriage. I was stripped of my rights and respect and left to reach out into the empty air...and here, I'm the one beginning the formal end. I can't find my traction when I don't know where I stand.

Still, there's the guilt, the feelings of failure. I have never been so grateful for my "forgive and forget" mentality as I have been these last two months. Bitterness is a noxious gas. We are making our exodus from holy matrimony as lambs, and we are holding one another's hand...I ought to rejoice. The sense of inadequacy will fade.

But, yesterday found my air rank with it. I spent the whole of last night somewhere between wakefulness and slumber. I likened a lot of my early emotions to a scab that kept being pulled off. I'd reach one level of healing, and then something would happen and I'd have to start all over again...add weariness to pain, and it spells bad news, bucko. Yesterday, it began to fall off on its own, and the wound looked pretty darn good. The sense of stability, of moving forward, sang to me through my melancholy, and I was spent with the duality of it by nightfall.

"Upward and onward," as they say. I really am very lucky.