I Want A Divorce
How to say the words that I knew I needed to say out loud
I knew I was getting divorced; I didn’t have the words to say it yet. I told my husband I would go to Rome to celebrate my twenty-ninth birthday. This led to a battle royale fight in the kitchen, as it always did if I chose to speak to him. Every conversation led to an escalating battle where sometimes his fist would rise above me, and I’d wonder what the fuck he was thinking.
Sometimes, instead of the potential of a raised arm, he would corner me and then press into me with his larger stature into my smaller frame. It began to blur how little I talked and how many times I tried to stay out until 1 a.m. to avoid him.
The trip was meant to celebrate my birthday, but his argument was that I’d miss our wedding anniversary three days after my birthday. I didn’t plan for both my wedding and my birthday to coincide. He did; he wanted me to be twenty-five when he married me, so he planned the date according to me turning just that age, three days after my birthday.
I called up my mother one day a year into living in a new state alone, without family, friends, or anything. It was because he was trying to break through a locked door. When did it get easy? I asked her if it was normal to barricade my body weight against a door to stop him from getting…
