And The Rest is Silence.

My marriage made its ending remarks yesterday.

It was a long time coming. We haven't lived together in over a year. A while back now, when I told him I wasn't ready to coexist under the same roof again yet, he said he couldn't wait. So we moved out of each others' lives, and it's been for our best. All of us. Although Princess Duckie may not get her parents together all that often, I think she gets the best of both of us when we have her.

We tried. We really did. That's what I find so unfortunate in people's cynicism regarding the term of a marriage. The tendency to act as if you didn't try. Maybe we didn't try our best, and maybe we could have tried differently, but we did try.

He always had a funny way of putting things simply that really made sense. So for once yesterday, I let him talk. I told him I would listen. I cried silently, but not with regret. Just a kind of release. A goodbye to the trying.

Here's what he told me. He told me that as much as he loved and missed me, there comes a point when you realize that waking up lonely is better than waking up next to the person you love angry.

I remember that anger we had. The way it would sometimes swell in our throats in the morning. Suffocating the love we might have made or the sleepy small talk we might have cuddled over. I remember feeling something close to hatred when our fights would reach their fever pitch. I remember holding each other in love that was tinged with sadness that we couldn't stop the fights.

He's right. Waking up lonely is much preferable to sadness that just paralyzes you in an awful cycle of finding ways to be disappointed with each other.

He told me when he saw people—people we both knew, people who ask about our baby and how things are—he always said the nice things about me. When it came time to answer how our relationship was faring, he said that we just aren't doing as well as we hoped we would.

There was a lot of hope with that trying. When we wed, I was just out of college and happy to fall in love for a real, live good guy who wanted to make my secret little dream about being a wife and mother come true. He was older and happily surprised to find a girl so carefreely loving. I made him silly presents and called him sweet nicknames. We really hoped this was going to work. But something just couldn't quite connect between time and space to bring us to some space of common ground, like we hoped for.

I try to keep the idea in my head that hope cannot be destroyed...only converted. I'm hoping now that the friendship we once shared within our relationship will be enough to get us through these proceedings with some grace and dignity and even love still intact. We do have fun together still at times, and I'm hoping that can be more of the case as Duckie gets bigger and wants us together more often for various rites of family. I hope we can both find the long-term situation we thought we had found within one another and be happy about it. Because we do still have a long-term relationship. Just not quite the way we planned.

One of my girls took me out for drinks last night for the bereavement and celebration of the passage of one life for the enhancement of the next. As luck ordained, I ran into someone that knew me as part of a couple that had shared many mutual friends. He asked how we were, and I said we were friends. And I meant it.

Marriage is sorta like jumping off a cliff and trying to hold someone's hand. You don't want to let go, but sometimes the winds just prove too much. Before you know it, when you land on the ground, you don't even recognize the person you leaped with. You lost touch with the turbulence, and there's just this distance left that is finally too far to cross.

We had a moment, and it couldn't last. But I've got some real faith that our friendship can make it longer, and if there's any sort of method to the mayhem, this whole thing just might make each of us stronger.

Conversion can be a tedious process, but I'm hopeful about what's on the other side.