She stood there in the dark. The blaring music and ice-cold beverage was enough for him to ignore her existence.
As her throat lumped and her eyes became glossy; she finally came to grips with something heart-wrenching. The only change made in the man she thought she had loved; was the mere upgrade from his canned, to bottled beer.
Looking around, before she could utter a single word, she glanced down at his bottle. She thought, “the irony of that symbolic bottle.”
Their house, SHE had invested every dime in, ironically had ended up being just as empty as the bottle he held in his hand. He had merely shattered the family and household she had spent their whole marriage building.
He reached for his beloved bottle and finally realized she had been standing there, all this time. She swallowed the lump in her throat and felt it slowly begin to move down into an un-ignorable knot within her stomach.
She fought to ignore the knot while trying to find the courage to speak. She took a deep breath and uttered, “I’m leaving to visit my children.” As he let off a drunken laugh, implying the stupidity in her actions, he slurred, “I want a divorce.”
Although this almost came as a relief to her, the pain of those four words were nothing less than agonizing. The sickening feeling within her stomach worsened until it almost became too paralyzing to stand.
She stopped without initially reacting and reflected back on the triumphs of their marriage: his chemo, him losing his job, his drinking habits, his temper and realized somewhere along the way, she had lost herself.
She had wrapped her life around one, single way, his. In no way did this come to any surprise to her, she had single handedly paved the way to a bed she would have to lie in.
Her legs feeling weak, she found the strength she never thought she had. She took one, single step.
That one step ended up leading to another. Then, she walked right out the door. She had finally walked out on his problems and looked forward to the lifetime of mending her own.
She almost turned around but looking back she saw the one thing that gave her enough strength to keep going. Through the dark house and emotionless man sitting on the couch, a glint of light reflected off a set of pictures.
Stopping to take a look at what had caught her eye, she could barely make out enough of the reflection to see…. her four children’s school pictures, in a line, hanging on the wall.
For once, without a streak of doubt to run through her body, she realized she made the right decision. It was now crystal clear.
She drove off that night, but this time it was different. She drove away with a smile. She had found what she loved most. Herself.
-C. Ann-
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