aniversaries

Since I was the one who filed for divorce, why does that date still haunt me?
The loss of the dream? The collapse of hearts? The lack of faith I have in my own common sense? I think of how I met a man/boy that made me thrill to the core. Who thought I was lovely. No small thing. 20 years of marriage - my mom used to say, "Patty was happily married for 20 years, Steve about 18." But that wedding date and the promises of bliss...alas and alack!! This year I was made aware again of how that date sticks to my subconscious like cigarette smoke to the walls. Unobtrusively but destructively always there, gathering in dank and dangerousness. It always hits sometime during the day...an unpleasant sense of having left something important out. Then the gradual realization that it isn't important anymore, it is just out. Done. This year, and honestly, I know I knew it, the man I love with was still trying to get hold of his son. It was the son's birthday. I thought, what an irony. It is son's birthday on my former aniversary (Ironic because his daughter got married last Nov. on my birthday.) So I knew there was this birthday on my dreaded date but this time, as I responded by a tilt of my head in what I have come to know as the dead fish pose, I questioned how one date could be so extreme? The date is full of the anticipation I had for a long joyous wedded life. The dismay as the date was able to remain standing long after the marriage was destroyed. It also holds the crazy serenity of new parents on the birth of their first child, and stereotypically correctly, a son. How much can a day hold, I wonder on days like Pearl Harbor Day, Fourth of July, my aniversary? Answer: more than a heart can hold.