I was walking back to my car after therapy. My appointment was tearful, as expected, but I can’t cry in front of strangers, even strangers I’m paying to watch me cry. So I mostly just sat silently with my fists balled up, reading the self-help titles on her shelf. None of them said, “How to Deal When You Just Want to Burn Down the World,” so I told her I wanted to get a tattoo. Wisely, she said, “Don’t get a tattoo when you’re like this.”

The tattoo shop was a few blocks down. I didn’t know what I wanted until I stood in front of the door. I reviewed my year in cinemascope: 2008 was politics for me. I worked on a senate campaign. I got my dream job working for an independent political media outlet. I was glued to the coverage. One of my favorite moments was Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. She quoted Harriet Tubman who supposedly said (I haven’t been able to find the quote since), “If you hear the dogs, keep going.”

I loved the sentiment, loved how Clinton delivered the line, and liked the tingly stomach it gave me after I heard it. I did not anticipate, months down the line, that I would be back to my usual fluffy-light self and that explaining my tattoo and its meaning would make me feel like a complete tool. But, on that afternoon…

I went in for a consultation, and ended up with an appointment. The girl with the bleached air and Monroe piercing pointed to a book of fonts. I chose the first one I saw. I decided to divide the quote between my upper arms. The tattoo dude took about an hour to sketch the stencil, so I sat in the waiting room in a trance. I watched a pride of high school girls rumble in and ask for belly button piercings. I watched the blonde girl and her gothy co-worker share a bagel. I doodled on a newspaper. I called my mom, then my best friend. I thought of how this would be the first major life change in 10 years I wouldn’t share with Chris, and I was a little thrilled under my sorrow.

Finally in the chair, Jeremy the tattoo artist pressed the stencils against my arm. He was 40, maybe older. Wizened and silent. Perfect because I didn’t want to talk about anything. He did the left arm first, which was the shorter line (”keep going”). It hurt less than I thought it would, and I felt like a badass. Then he went to the right arm, and the pain was tenfold. I stared down the photos of pinup girls on his walls, the little notes past clients had left him. Tears came to my eyes and he asked if he should stop. I said no and tried not to clutch the chair. It felt like what it was: a needle ripping open my skin.

And I finally understood all that noise about tattoos: you took the emotional pain, and you zenned it into the physical. The physical, of course, is explainable and solvable: the pain is caused by a needle, and it will stop when the needle is finished. Better than the broken heart pain which is full of: why, and what if and an agenda that laughs in your face.

The whole process took 15 minutes. It looked perfect; just how I’d wanted it. I stood up, light-headed, shook Jeremy’s hand and walked out, bandages taped to my bleeding arms. I called my mom again, felt a little elated. Walked to my car, turned the key. And then I didn’t know what to do. Did I just…go home to my empty house? The blank afternoon paralyzed me, and I sat in my car for close to an hour. My arms were sore, and I flipped up the bandages every few minutes to look.

That night, my friend Dave — prompted by a call from my mother who was worried — invited me to dinner at a cafe near his house. We sat outside and I didn’t eat anything. I cried quietly the entire time in a hooded sweatshirt, and the material rubbed against my bandages. Dinner was a mistake. I ran into an old co-worker and ducked my head. I went home, sat on my bed and turned off my phone, rubbed the healing ointment on my arms. Everything hurt, but something had changed. A rock formed in my sternum and grew. Here I was, divorced and inked up and yelling into my pillow like a cut toddler. But here I was: solid, fully-formed, choices all my own.

Of course, three weeks later, Chris and I got back together. And I wear t-shirts if I’m around people, too embarrassed to reveal my arms, which are corny as hell. But there’s something about knowing the tattoos are there, and when I’m stressed or feeling helpless, my fingers automatically rub them. For a reminder, I guess:

I lived! I lived! I lived.

Cathedral Hill in St. Paul is where F. Scott wrote his novels, and where he and Zelda smashed up shit like rich hoodlums. The buildings are antique, bronzed, and not much taller than the trees. There’s lot of trees. And there’s the cathedral which sits sideways, watching over the city like a benevolent monster. Depending on the luster of your soul, it inspires comfort or terror, and for us half-breeds, both.

I parked my car at the top of the hill, got out, still shaky from not eating for a week. It’s amazing that I survived on coffee, bread and broth for so long, but it’s all my stomach would take. You might be the same way, but my stomach’s an emotional barometer, and nothing was going in or coming out that week. I had 10 minutes before my appointment, so I walked around, dizzy to the point where I thought I might pass out on the street. There were enough people around to witness my fall, and this is Minnesota, people call ambulances for strangers. And maybe I wouldn’t be a stranger, for long. Maybe this would be my new digs: a place to write my novels, to recover. How beautiful the first snow would be on the cathedral; I’d walk there each day. I’d light a candle. I’d start smoking, and track the streets like a ropey beast. Romantic!

Romantic on paper. Not in real life. There is nothing romantic about a broken heart; there’s really, really not. It’s romantic after it’s done, and it’s romantic when it happens to other people, fictional other people, but in the end, it’s about as romantic as a broken toe, and just as fixable.

The property manager was what we called a Wayzata Housewife: rich blonde highlights, starched shirts, caked make-up, sparkly ears. She was on the phone and motioned for me to come over. The office was sparse, and decorated like the Moulin Rouge, which I tried to take as a good sign, ah, yes, HOME!, but instead I slumped in a chair. She had two senior portraits of her equally blonde daughter facing out. The daughter had a horsey-smile and what we would call a softball-player face, and I looked away.

I knew exactly what I looked like, but didn’t have the energy to apologize: dull auburn hair (dyed last week), chipped black nail polish, untied sneakers with no socks and jeans that were falling off my hips. My face, Halloween-colored. There might’ve been a time when I wanted to look like this, when I would’ve cultivated the look of a kidnapped child locked in a closet for seventeen years, but that morning I’d spent more minutes that I wanted to admit spackling my face in a desperate hopefulness.

We were on the street, walking into the sun, talking about the weather. She walked fast; I did not. I didn’t know everything slowed down, you know? And soon we were in an apartment, and it was quaint and small and pretty, and I nodded and made tiny bird noises about it, and then suddenly we were in the laundry room, which was cemented and spidery and had rows and rows of industrial machines, and my stomach took this moment to thump against whatever inner wall surrounds it: OH HELL NO, said my stomach, and I put my face into my coat to keep from gagging.

There was an idea, of course, that if I left our house, if I moved into my own place, some cute, sparse studio with the cats - where I would write! I’d write like Scott and wail like Zelda! - that I’d feel better. Just get out of that house, everyone said. That house is suffocating you! You can’t live there alone like the last pea in the can. And of course, because I am this person, this imaginative, deathly hopeful ingenue, I thought - well, if there’s a change of venue, if he sees Writer Me in my adorable apartment overlooking the church, well, maybe then he’ll…

The next apartment was fine. Then we got in a car and drove down the street and she asked in a distracted, bright voice, “Doing anything fun today?” And I blurted out why I was looking at apartments, which was not the correct answer to her question, and she, like any stranger who’s had a three-ton unsolicited confidence hoisted on her, mumbled something, and kept driving. And the next apartment was fine, too, next door to the cathedral, really beautiful, actually, but then she showed me the “fitness room” which was a treadmill stuffed in a basement corner, lit by a single bulb swaying on a chain, and I could not shake the idea of, this is where lonely people live, this where single people live, this is where ____ people live. And I thought of our home, my home, which was sticky with memory, every corner, every inch of wall, but there was the noun of it: home.

She knew I wasn’t going to take it. Didn’t even hand me a card. Driving down the hill, my ribs aching, I called my dad, who’s been visiting for the week. He was at my home, watching the football game. “Let’s get pie,” I said, and told him I’d be there in 10 minutes. I stopped on the side of the road to cry a little, because I do this lately, this crying thing and I wondered how Chris was doing, and where he was, and what he was thinking, and I remembered that Zelda died in a fire and Scott died of a heart attack, and thought, OK, maybe we’re better off, maybe this is all for the best. But we aren’t fiction, which has always been the problem.

It costs to light candles in the cathedral, anyway.

Despite all the love - all that love! basins of it! - we were, as they say, bad for each other. We brought out, as they say, the worst in each other. The very, very worst. It was a very unbalanced tragedy: there was no one to root for. No protagonists. Just two very young, very stupid, very bored and careless villians who cat-slapped each other to death. I can’t imagine a more boring play. No, that’s wrong, it was interesting. We were interesting. It was all completely interesting and complicated, but in the end, when we realized how stupid we were, it was too late. Damage done!

It’s easy to dimiss it like this, of course. It - I can’t even give it a name. It - the relationship - us! You and me. Now there is: you. Me.

I used to be this way: when I needed my life to change, I caused disaster. Who knows why. Lots of Sweet Valley High books as a kid, maybe. I didn’t know how to make the change without being a total nutcase. Once, when I was 20, I guess I wanted a change, so I jumped straight into Chris like a suicide off a bridge. The chaos! I didn’t expect anything to work out. He was my vessel, you know? The way out.

But something happened, of course. I surprised myself and everyone around me by falling in love, and staying there, and staying there, and STAYING there. For years, we stayed there. We stay there now. But if I was the jumper and he was the lifeboat, you have to know we never made it back to land. He caught me, we paddled, we enjoyed the sun and the fish, but we got too far out. So we - you know - sunk. We did not starve. We didn’t get eaten by sharks. The boat wasn’t made for long-ass cruises. So it broke. And we sunk.

Not so romantic, I guess. But a little: today, I called him without thinking to bitch about my bad afternoon. I was driving somewhere. I got lost. I told him where I was going. He said, “Oh, that’s right over by the seafood store you’ve always wanted to go to.” Small detail! But who else knows these things about me? For so long, it was just him and me. Really, just him and me. No room for anyone else. We were out on the boat for a long, long time. Sometimes I think we’re still out there. Hard to say! Who can say! Still hurts, all the same.

2. In her office after I realized I was spending yet another day doing nothing except staring blankly into my broken laptop, and occasionally walking to the kitchen to stare blankly at the coffeepot. She told me I should go to Italy, and then hugged me like kind people do, with intention and a timelessness. I could let go when I wanted, or not at all.

3. On the couch in the porch for the first of what will be many, many summer porch parties, drinking a watery Premium, surrounded by people I had come to love in my own way. At the office I told Amber I had plans to see a movie with Chris. She said, no, I had plans to have people on my porch, and then gathered the troops. I am not a person who lets people hold me. Was not.

4. In the kitschy store with Abbey, buying fuzzy yellow duck slippers for her baby.

5. Running barefoot in the rain in my new white dress, the top two buttons undone. He had just left the porch. I caught up with him by his car, handed him the last cupcake and kissed him on the cheek. I turned, ran to the house, didn’t look back. Back in the house, he called me from the road, instructed me to brush my teeth.

I’ve written this post a hundred times. Why do I always tell you my process? So I wrote it a hundred times. I wanted to be beautiful with it, even though I feel like I’ve swallowed a bucket. Huge, hollowed, dirty. See, I went to our state political convention this weekend and spent, like, 15 hours a day running around and didn’t eat or sleep, and by the time Sunday rolled around, I was wrung out and bruised, but thrilled. It was a good convention! Things went our way.

I walked into the house, excited to hug him and smell him and just feel at home with him. You know. But everything was gone? Oh, there are so many details here. I don’t want to go into them. But the thing is, he had plenty of time to tell me and he didn’t. Tell me. He was gone. He saw me the morning of. He had to drive down to Rochester to bring me my spare car key because my purse was stolen. (Found later!) I said, “See you at home?” He said, “Yeah!” At home, there was nothing. His stuff gone. One of the cats missing. I didn’t understand at first. Was he spring cleaning? I spent the next six hours discovering things, and the last thing I noticed was the pictures. He took the pictures! Off the wall! How thorough!

I didn’t see it coming. OK, a lie, I thought about it. Things had been so bad that I worst-case scenarioed it: what if he moves out while I’m out of town? But I thought - who would do that? Not him, not this guy. Not my guy. But, yes, my guy. He sent me a text message? That finally explained everything? But he shut off his phone so I couldn’t contact him or find out where he was.

It was the not knowing, really. It was spooky. I walked into a house that felt thieved, and my husband was gone, too? Aliens? Did he fall into a wormhole? Did I fall into a wormhole where I never met him, and was just living by myself? But I’d have pictures on the wall, then. Funny how this seemed more logical than truth: I just got left. Like they do in soap operas. Like they do in Oprah books. Now I need to go to Italy or something and buy a villa. Or have an affair with some mechanic who has a big heart. Whatever those women do in those things.

But all I’ve been doing is walking around with my heart hanging out of my chest. I’m letting everyone touch it. (That sounds dirty, right? Don’t take it dirty, damn it.) Abbey came over and bought me groceries and made me lunch and then I sort of did this collapsing on the bathroom floor thing for a while. I was still wearing my dress from the victory party on Saturday. I wore it all day, and all night. Why change clothes? Might as well stay in the moment, like a photograph. Frozen forever! So my eight-months-pregnant best friend slept on my couch while I leaned against the bathroom in a tight black dress, my make-up halfway down my arms.

Last night, I sat on the porch with friends and drank beer with the windows open. They are all holding my hand through this. My mom flew up today, just to be my mom. And people care! Everyone is like, WHOA WHAT? And I say, I KNOW, RIGHT? And Chris is not a shitty person though he did this shitty thing. I’ve talked to him. We’re waiting it out. We’re seeing what happens. But still…

It happened! This happened! It is unbearable! It’s unbearable. But I do bear it. So far. But here we are, again. My life was going to be that, and now it’s this. It is uncertain and horribly painful. No, wait, no platitudes. I feel terrible. There was a moment in a car where I was driving in the rain and my chest cavity was collapsing and I thought for sure it was an asthma attack and I thought FOR SURE I had to go home and die somehow because how can you live through this? It’s one thing at 18, and another at 22. But I’m getting old, here. This was a marriage! Six years. We gave up a lot to be together, and now we’re giving it up again. To be away from each other.

I am too old, and too young for this. No, I’m just too sensitive for this. No, too human! I always wanted to be an animal. Or an island. Something autonomous and wise. God, it sucks. But I go on. I do, right? Go on?