After a month of wrangling, what was left of my material life came home today. Box after box trooped up the stairs on the shoulders of strong, South American men. This fantastic, stepped chest of drawers was unwrapped and placed in this new, decidedly NOT oriental, part of the world. Part of the movers⿿ job is to unpack the boxes and cart the empties away, but I couldn⿿t stand to have them help undo the last of what was done, as though this were some everyday move, some quiet family returning from a life abroad. As though this were somehow just another day. I shooed them out the door as soon as I was able, and stood in the current wreckage of my past life. My married life. Six cubic meters. That⿿s what these past five years, and all the years of my adult life before then, had boiled down to.
My husband had become more and more vocal about leaving the US, a year after September 11, 2001. It seemed that day had unhinged everything: our business, our love, our lives. Only we didn⿿t know it at the time. And on October 1, 2004, I found myself boarding an airplane to Dubai; everything I owned had been sold, given away, or stored to ship to my new life. The King of Everything and I were travelling on our own, as Papa had gone ahead a month earlier to begin his new job. I⿿d never lived far from home, far from my family, and some deep, dark part of my soul knew this marriage wasn⿿t strong enough to withstand this kind of stress. But my husband wanted to move, and so I tried. I really did.
Today, I opened the boxes that had travelled back from that larger-than-life land, and breathed in once more the scents of its spice
souks, the swirl of the sand in the air, the hot, heavy presence of the United Arab Emirates that never leaves you once it⿿s soaked into your pores, gotten under your skin, made you love it more than you⿿d realized, until it⿿s gone. I have been mourning the loss of what Marriage promised ever since Christmas. Today, I mourn the loss of that adventure, of that us-against-the-world that a true marriage is. I have lost the right to die with the man who should have known me best at my side. The man who fathered my child, who promised to be there, no matter what, is gone on the other side of the world. I hold the summer clothes to my face and breathe in the cinnebar and oud smell of the life I lost, but I do not cry. I try to imagine what treasures will fill these 28 drawers. I try to think of the future this treasure will witness, the grandchildren it will delight. I try not to think of the dark, of the past, of the loss. I miss being married. In the long nights, in the bitter days, I remember what it was like, and I remind myself that, no matter how hard my life is now, we are happier. We are better. We are healing.
Treasures. I⿿ll make my life a treasure hunt, and fill my pockets as I go, bring back what I find to fill up the drawers, and tell the stories when I⿿m old. Someone will listen.
divorce,
expat,
moving,
moving out,
relocation,
separation,
single mom,
single mother
