“I always forget you went to night school. So impressive.”
We stopped in front of a bench. “Ever notice that all the park benches are inscribed?” He pointed to an inscription.
I peered closer.We would make the same mistake all over again!—Vic & Nancy Schiller. Still Best Friends.
“What do you think the mistake was?” he asked.
“Having kids?”
He laughed. “So I take it you’re on the fence.” He looked at my wrist. “How’s it feeling?”
I flexed it gently. “Getting better. I went to acupuncture this morning. I think it actually helped.”
“I hear it’s super calming.”
I laughed. “That wasn’t really my experience, but I wouldn’t trust my review.”
“Are you one of those people who thinks Eastern medicine is a hoax?”
“No. It was just ... weird. But in a way that was totally specific to me.”
He chuckled. “Can you be a little more specific forme?”
We sat down. I wrinkled my nose, weighing if Charlie would be empathetic to a retelling of my erratic emotional spiral, then decided to try. He was an active listener in a way that made me want to keep talking.
“Afterward I had to pull myself together and pretend to meditate in a room full of people.”
“Oof. Emilie must really hate you.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
I shifted carefully on Vic and Nancy’s bench. “I haven’t thought about kids for a while. I don’t know how to explain it. It just felt ... jarring. Iwason that path, and now I’ve never been further from it.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “I think I want a family. My parents had their issues, but I can’t remember ever seeing them fight. Not once.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope.”
“I don’t even think that’s healthy! You missed out on a formative life experience.”
“Dysfunction looks different on everyone.”
“I don’t remember a time when my parents weren’t fighting,” I admitted. “They were from totally different worlds. They never put in the work to understand each other.”
“There’s probably some healthy medium between your parents and mine.”
“Probably Nancy and Vic.”
It was starting to snow. I wrapped my coat tighter. “I kind of want to keep going back to acupuncture just for the emotional release. It beats being in my head all the time.”
“Is that how you feel? Like you can’t get out of your head?”
I nodded and dug my hands into my pockets. “I think this is why you’re supposed to be middle-aged with kids when you get divorced. No time to be self-absorbed. You have to focus on not fucking up your kids.”
“I don’t think kids make someone less self-absorbed when they’re going through something like that.”
“Maybe not, but it still just feels so heavy. Physically, I’mhere, doing all the things I dreamed about. But I don’t know how to separate myself from it. It’s like it stunted me.”
