La Bella Luna

Tonight the moon is some 30,000 kilometers closer to the earth than usual, with the added benefit of being a full moon, so it’s exceptionally large and bright in the sky. It is, in fact “Cosmo’s Moon,” just like in Moonstruck.

I stopped for a few minutes out in front of our apartment building this evening, just admiring the moon. It always shows us the same face – turning, miraculously, just enough on its own axis as it circles our planet, to never reveal its backside, like a self-conscious girl at the swimming pool. It makes me think of the faces we show to people and the things we kept carefully turned away. The dark side.

I spent most of the day wrangling, stupidly, with Gray over details of our divorce. Money, mostly. We each got wound around our separate axels, sniping at each other and nit-picking, escalating things until it reached the patently absurd. It’s just money. It’s just money, not love. Not our future or our past or our promises or shortcomings. Not our child or our twelve years together. It’s just money. When I went to pick up Grayson this evening we each looked at the other, and remembered that we have never really had a reason not to trust one another, and we both apologized – me for being a petty bitch over money… Gray for writing nasty things about me in an email.

We parted amicably. Again. For now. It’s perfectly miserable, this process. I refuse to let it turn us into bitter enemies. If we can no longer be married, at least we can remember that we started out as friends. I hope. Otherwise, it’s just too depressing all around, for the future of everything. My god, if love ends in enmity, why bother? Why go on?

The moon. Waxing and waning. It’s too easy a metaphor.

I was standing in my office at the end of the day today, lamenting to Krysten, my assistant, about how useless I have been for the past three months as this melodrama has unfolded. Every time I begin to feel that I’m getting a grip, something new comes along to scramble things again. Fighting with Gray made me feel sick. And in explaining it to her, I think I found an answer, if a small one, for some of how I feel.

“It’s not Gray I miss,” I said. And I realized…it’s true. My feelings for him – specifically, as a life partner, as a person – have changed over the past three months, because of all the heartache and all the anger, plus the realization that the Gray I loved and the Gray I’ve been living with have been two different people for a long time now. “It’s my family I miss. I miss the family we were when we were all together. I miss Grayson’s dad. It’s just me and G now.”

It was a minor epiphany. It explained to me some of the conflicting feelings I have. I still feel sad when I see Gray, or talk to him (when we’re not fighting about something). But I don’t want him back. Not anymore. My heart does not yearn for him like it did at first. My heart, like Grayson’s lip, is mending. But I miss my family. I yearn for that comfortable hominess, the predictable routines, the known cocoon of Family. Grayson and I have ours, but it’s not the same. There’s no daddy in our family now. I could never go back to that family now. The truth, the history, is changed now. It would never be the same family, operating on the assumption that we were and had been and would always be together. That is lost forever.

What I’m finding is that there are peculiar folds and trap doors and secret rooms in my heart. It seems impossible to understand why I feel what I feel. Every time I move into a new place in there, I’m finding some new convolution, some hidden corner, some complication. Sometimes it’s full of light, and sometimes, bleak emptiness.

The dark side of the moon. The unknown, unseen, unfathomable, but always there. A constant yin and yang of complete and irreconcilable contradiction.

The other thing about tonight is, that there’s a meteor shower. Haven’t seen any. It’s a bit overcast, and I’m foiled by light pollution in the city. But meteors complicate my metaphor too much, so I can’t talk about them here…. : )