Way back when, a year or so before our marriage fell apart—before I suicide-bombed what was left of it, that is—I found a therapist on campus and spilled my guts, desperate for a practical solution to an emotional quagmire. How could I possibly find fault in a husband who worshipped me, who wrote notebooks full of poetry about me? Why was I so unhappy? When the therapist asked what I valued most in my life with Stuart, I pretended to be joking when I answered, Our cat, Finch. The therapist didn’t laugh, though. He was so earnest when he said, “The beautiful things that grow from decay can make it awfully hard to leave the garden.”

After I stopped judging his platitude, I was gobsmacked to find it rang true. And so I understood that I hadn’t been seeking marital advice so much as permission to leave. My therapist offered the practical solution I thought I wanted: sit down with Stuart—the only other person in my marriage, the only person in the whole world entitled to an opinion on the fate of my marriage—with a willingness to ask and answer the uncomfortable questions I’d been avoiding. Have the difficult conversations, this man advised. He made it sound so simple. Instead, I blew the whole thing up. My terrorism was absolute—designating a victim, a villain, an event—while sparing Stuart from having to ask the only question that mattered, from having to hear me answer, No, I don’t love you anymore.

To punish myself, I denied myself that which I valued most: Finch, my career, the respect of my peers. I let Stuart keep the cat, the friends, the apartment, restaurants and cafés. These sacrifices felt so generous—signing over the rights, erasing myself for his convenience—that I hardly considered how it must’ve felt to coexist with all that evidence of what we shared: the furniture, the plants, the holes in a wall where I hammered nails before thinking to check for studs. The calico cat named after a bird. Meanwhile, I kept nothing but a ratty undershirt and a journal full of handwritten poems that could almost get me high. Rolling the stem of sea holly between two fingers, I read on—

North of Blue Eye, due south of Marvel Cave,

You came to be, a being forced to leave

Your single-cell utopia to save

Yourself, you see, for you’d begun to cleave.

Bereft, so severed by your Great Divide,

You built a world beneath your mother’s skin.

Like this, you split apart and multiplied,

Then nine months on, were pushed away again.

Mother to Dickinson to sisterfriend:

Each life you fused to refused to make fast.

Yet every failed attachment’s bitter end

Prepared the open wound to better graft

My pneuma, form and vital heat to yours:

A heart made whole by Love’s return to Source.