30 Years to Life

Some things are meant to be hard.

Who in the hell gets back together with their ex-wife 30 years after their divorce?

I knew it was trouble going in. But something had to be done. Thirty years ago, we were both 35 and figured we could still make a life for ourselves. We got so sick of each other, we ruined ourselves. Our jobs were shit. Our bodies were shot. We had decomposed each other’s souls to the point that we hardly believed in our own existence. Twelve years of a marriage that should have never happened will do that to people. But we had hope. We were young enough to find new love, new careers, happy lives. And so we set out to do that. 

But we didn’t realize that when someone makes the wrong decisions for 35 years, they usually don’t suddenly start making right ones. And neither of us broke the pattern. We just kept on doing the same damn things we did before, only a little slower and with a little more disbelief that we could never be doing all this all over again. 

I was on my own. I remarried a woman who didn’t annoy me in the same ways, but in other ways, which made it seem less. You did, too. I found a few jobs that didn't work out, but eventually found one that worked out well enough. You did, too. But at some point, after we forgot our damn patterns, mainly because we never really learned them, we started to fall into the same mistakes. 

The marriages broke apart. My wife died before I could leave her. Your husband left before you could leave him, beating you to it. Our jobs fell apart and we got new ones, but they weren’t quite as good as the ones we just had, and we knew that at our ages, 68 damn years-old, we weren’t gonna get anything better. We were gonna have to settle for anything that paid the bills. Social Security would help a little, but not much in this economy. We both needed a little help. We were both in the same situation. We didn’t hate each other, we were still friends, and we were both old enough to not desire anything more from each other, much less expect it. So we moved back in together, after 30 years, to see if we can help each other out, to see if we don’t have to spend our final years struggling for the basics, alone, begging our kids to help us out, our kids who are making the same mistakes as us because mistakes are the one thing poor people do pass on to their young. We didn’t want that. We wanted a little dignity and peace and figured if we knew each other for almost 50 years and haven’t killed each other by now, maybe we can make this work. 

And then we were back together again, 30 years after saying rescinding those vows we made but both knew deep down inside were worthless. And now, both of us thinking, maybe we did mean it in a way, maybe all we needed was a few decades apart to live happily ever after.

But three weeks after I moved in, I move out, moving faster than I have in about 30 years. 

Every annoyance, every frustration, every puncture of my gut and kick to my heart came back. Memory is a pain enhancement. Maybe if everything we did to annoy each other now wasn’t compounded with 15 years of marriage that screwed up our heads for 30 years after that, maybe this could have worked. That’s one thing we can agree on, my dear ex-wife, yes, we finally have agreed on something: We’d rather die alone than with each other.