Begin Again

An excerpt from a memoir in progress.

I knew a young woman, a poet, whose marriage ended. She posted about it on social media: Big Life Announcement, was the headline. Then she wrote her husband’s name and said they were no longer a couple. The second part of the announcement was she was moving away to start a new teaching job in a new city. The headline suggested detachment, even a tiny note of flippancy, but I’d seen her only weeks before at a literary reading, how she barely raised her head while sitting in the audience, her friends surrounding her. I remembered how we’d spoken at a gathering some years before where I knew almost no one. She’d drawn close to ask about my work. She was genuinely curious, interested, kind.

I had no strategy to tell my circle of friends and acquaintances that my own marriage had ended. Social media was out of the question. But there were a few people who lived far away I had to tell, including a friend who, together with her husband, had chosen my husband and me as godparents to their son. So I wrote my friend a letter. A few days later the phone rang late at night. It was her. I let it ring and ring and then made myself answer.

We talked for two hours. When I tried to explain, she said simply, “Susan, I know your heart.” Her compassion and understanding were a balm to the guilt and shame I felt.

Then she said, “Have you thought about moving?” I had of course. Immediately after my husband told me he was leaving, I’d applied for jobs in other cities, but the job I landed was close to home. She suggested a new start could be just what I needed and invited me to come for a visit to her home in the Midwest.

I went to bed long after midnight but woke feeling rested. Something felt distinctly different. I lay in bed, trying to figure out what it was. And then I realized. I felt hope.

I could begin again—as just myself.

In a new place, a new city, a new job perhaps, a new church, make new friends.

I could begin again where I was not the rejected wife. Where I was not an object of speculation—what was it that caused such a rift after so many years?

I could begin again where I did not have to worry about running into friends or casual acquaintances who asked after him at the grocery store, Costco, the bookstore—anywhere in the community where we’d lived for 30 years.

I could begin with a new house of my own, small, more modest than the one we’d had, but wholly mine. A house no one could take from me, except maybe the bank.

I could begin again hoping for a morning when I did not have to convince myself the day was worth getting out of bed, that the future still held possibilities for joy, that I had not yet met all the people who might love me.

I could begin again having become the new person I never wanted to be.

Question:

Dear Reader, do you think a new beginning is possible by changing one’s surroundings? Please share in the comments if you’d like, and I’ll respond.

Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash