Leaving is logistics. It is list making; it is walking down cavernous aisles of Home Depot looking for moving boxes and packing tape; it is guilt; it is wrapping evenly split-up wedding gifts into layers and layers of clothing because you’re tired of buying packing materials and you know you’ll have to use the money you saved on something more urgent down the line anyway, like giving a deposit to the gas company; it is leaving the painful things behind because you cannot stand to look at them in your new life; it is knowing that you are forcing the person you are leaving to reckon with those reminders on his own; it is returning to your joint apartment days later to pick up things you forgot, only to find the picture frames you left behind that once had your wedding photos in them taken apart and lying on the floor with the pictures missing; it is realizing that you will never be touched by this person again.

It is doing the next action until all the actions accumulate into your being on your own in a new place and feeling free and feeling loss. Leaving is the initial rush of having your own space and your own time and your own life, but with an absence that feels so vast that it is literally unquantifiable. It is being afraid to keep the windows open at night because you no longer have someone to protect you, and so you sleep in two-hour increments, which you have convinced yourself will make you feel safer in your new life, this life you chose, this life without your partner. It is the life you chose but a choice you do not know how to talk about yet. It has been a long time coming and you have prepared yourself for it for months, and so you are not the surprised person in this scenario—you are the person who had the plan all along. But when people see you they act like someone has died, and they turn away from you, because they don’t know how to talk about divorce unless they’ve gone through it themselves.