Maybes

Some days the realization hits me like a bus - out of nowhere - it settles into my muscles and sticks there, won’t budge. Here we are. This is it. My husband left, moved out, rented a loft, moved out of the loft, sold his car, lost his job, lived in my garage, and acted like this is all how it has been supposed to go.  And the realization will hit me again, and again, in my moments of just trying to get through a day of drop-offs and meltdowns and too much screen time and pee leaking from diapers and ants in the kitchen and having to ask my dad for money - this is so fucked up.

Maybe I should have known things were headed this way when he started sneaking away to his studio every night a month after I gave birth to our second child. We can say studio loosely - it was our garage, and he had mostly turned it into a collection of bricks and wood and construction signs he would gather off the side of the road. It also became a collection of most of our mugs, with sooty coffee and mold brewing at the bottom of every cup. Piles of clothes I couldn’t make sense of. Garbage in empty paint cans. Maybe I should have known when the studio started to become that.