The weird thing is I don’t remember any of it, at the end, what happened when the bottom fell out.

I look back and it’s like I was drugged out or something, because it was just months of mounting fighting and ugly words and silence and deep pain mixed with numbness and aloneness at home and I was finally sleeping on the floor in the living room by the nice new couch for a few weeks and every word thrown when we were together was meant to shave off a little more of the last slivers of dignity or strength or light I had thought I had coming into things when I left home and moved out there for her.

I mean, what do you expect- you call off the wedding the day of, after people have arrived and the final prep is being complete, food brought in, clothes pressed, the beautiful bride’s gown ready to go- you call off the wedding, and you are gonna be reviled. You are going to be looked at with some burning question marks and black hearts. You hurt one person very badly- her- with a hurt of such public rejection and betrayal, and then you hurt a bunch of others too- friends, family members, largely in the pocket book, buying tickets to travel across the country, and getting gifts. You are going to be reviled, and by a few, for a long time.

And then, after all of that, spur of the moment, after bitter people have boarded flights and hopped in cars to hit the highways, you go the next day to the justice of the peace- with no witnesses, no family or friends near, no pastor, no wedding dress or bridesmaids or groomsmen or candelabras or flower settings or entrance of the bride or special music or public proclamation or first kiss in the soft chapel light or thrown rice or the drive away in the car with “Just Married” shoe-polished on the back window- you go to the justice and it’s rifled through in a quick stolid meeting in the hazy blue light of a tiny chamber witnessed by a public official stranger, and when you leave the courthouse, you think you’ve tried to right a wrong and you both act like it’s a normal day and on the way back to her parent’s house you feel worse than you did the day before. And then the fog set in.

It’s no wonder you feel nothing almost two years later. She hates you and has hated you since that weekend and you hated yourself after it as well, long since steeped in shame, without forgiveness. You were married to her and also to the horror of a weekend you created and there was no forgiveness.

You don’t remember what happened two years later because you were numb and alone and severely depressed and she brought in some papers and threw them at you and you just signed them without comprehending them and then you had two weeks to find an apartment in late December and you took the first thing you could find and you moved on January 1st on the day of a blizzard and Tom from high school came all the way in from the suburbs to help you which was amazing because you were numb and isolated and steeped in shame and couldn’t remember much, and fortunately you had nothing to take with you because she got everything, and you were lucky she didn’t punish you more with financial damages, and at least you didn’t need anything anyways except a quiet forgiving space in which to hide and shut down for months.

You had a futon mattress on the floor to sleep on and a tiny cheap white particle board bookshelf to put your Bible and a few books and a family photo on and a $5 alarm clock and a blue touch dial phone and the small childhood teddy bear Mom had made for you and a gob of clothes in the small closet and a few dishes in the cupboards and the wall heater that was set only to hot, stuffy and uncomfortable in the tiny studio apartment, even though the world was frigid white outside.

And you slept with the shame and depression on that futon mattress on the floor for the next year and some, trying hard to forgive yourself, trying hard to exorcise the numb and the ache that sat upon your chest and heart, trying hard to wake up,

The blackest weekends of my life.