In the attorney’s painfully bland office, all beiges and sailboat paintings, I am sitting here signing the papers that will finally dissolve us, papers that will end a year of rage and tantrums, like the time I plunged a knife into the hideous recliner chair his father gave us as a wedding gift, gutting those cushions like my soon-to-be-ex used to gut a deer, or the time he dug up three Evergreen trees in the middle of the night, yelling that I could take his house but not his Evergreens, or the time I threw a vase at his head and he laughed like a maniac as it shattered against the wall behind him; but what I think of as I sign the endless cascade of thick, expensive paper is how he once sliced up all the black olives from a jar and carefully placed them on the cheap delivery pizza that arrived without them, built a small set of stairs to our bed so our limpy dog, Cricket, could get in more easily, wrote and illustrated a story about Lulu and Bond (nicknames for our junk, completely disgusting, I know, but this was in the beginning when we were demented with lust), let my brother sleep on our couch for more than five months without complaint, got a perm just to make me laugh, carried me upstairs and downstairs when I broke my ankle instead of just letting me use my crutches like a normal person, wrote a song that made me sound better than I ever was, put up a tree swing in our backyard because I told him I’d always wanted one as a kid, made our bed every single day because he knew it was the household task I hated most, agreed that dogs were superior to children every time I said it even though he came from a family of seven and would have had kids in a heartbeat if I’d wanted them, gave me his undershirts to sleep in because I loved their smell, that soft worn out cotton, held me when I cried for every single day for months after my mother died, and how he had the decency to match every one of my petty tantrums during this year of divorce.
I fucking love this so much.