the end and mashed potatoes

Today is thanksgiving. It is hard to tell. it is tropical and warm and no one is discussing stuffing. Today I am going to spend thanksgiving with my broken family. Pretend for one day like we are not broken. Like we still exist. Eat mashed potatoes. A chicken instead of a turkey, the real thing is far from possible.

I didn't really know it was over till now. The end of something sounds clear and precise but in fact is a nebulous blur of possibility. Only now do I feel like it is over. The day I asked him to move out I didn't even believe it myself. When I left for Paris and he stayed in my house with our son possibility still existed. When he started seeing her and we spent that sad week floating down the river in Borneo looking at proboscis monkeys it felt over but in fact there would be months of what if's, more tears, a lot of anger.  More pulling than if we had been using a proper rope. 

The back and forth. The I want you, I miss you, go jump off a cliff is constant untill its not.

Now it is clear, real, I know it as well as I know how to make the stuffing. I know we are done. I feel nothing anymore. the sadness is gone and even the anger seems to be drying up like a creekbed in the summer. Mashed potatoes, gravy and divorce. 

He told our son about his new girlfriend and plans to introduce them this weekend were only halted by a stick to the eye, the obvious outcome of sordfighting at eleven. 

I no longer rile in a ball on the floor. I no longer spew tears like leaky faucets. I am hollow and empty like the balinese fire truck which recently showed up to a five alarm blaze totally empty of all liquid. Ironic or just tragic, I am not sure which. 

He seems like a stranger to me, someone I don't quite recognize. His choices that of a foreigner. I look at her and understand nothing. His friend on facebook inviting him to an evening of rainbow shots. His smoking. He has been released to the world. I am no longer there forming him. He is what he chooses to let other people make of him. Rainbow shots. 

I let him keep the leftovers. I had no desire to eat mashed potatoes and stuffing the next day. It was over we are done. Polite conversation and our son is all we exchange. No Turkey. All the searching doesn't produce on on an Island with no Turkeys. Just another day.