Time in a Bottle

It's prom season.  I took my SAT's in a high school gym that had just celebrated prom the night before.  All the decor was intact - the theme being "Time in a Bottle", a bittersweet Jim Croce song.  Oddly, there were bottles suspended from the ceiling by wires, and giant cut-outs of bottles with clocks in them plastered to the walls.  My guess is the prom committee was the usual coterie of literal-minded jocks and jills.  In any case, whenever prom season rolls around, I hearken back to that hot gym and that Jim Croce song.

"Time in a Bottle" was a love song, a lover lamenting that there would never be enough time to love his lover properly.  It became all the more poignant when Croce died in a plane crash at the age of thirty.  His wife Ingrid recently wrote a book about him and their great love.  Great love, frozen in time is the ideal love.  One can flower it up, evading the inevitable ugliness that comes with time in a relationship.  She truly got time in a bottle.  Unlike "Annie's Song" by John Denver.  Annie filled up his senses, like a night in the forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain - until she didn't, and they divorced.  The denouement of their marriage was that he tried to choke her, then, in a final fit of rage, he sawed their marital bed in half with a chainsaw.  True story.

What's my point? (I direct this question to me, as I am writing this blog solely for myself.)

The point is that even a love that spawned such poetry can wind up in tatters.  That Jim Croce's marriage probably would have ended just as badly.  That there's a reason 50th anniversaries make the paper and are crowed about - they are rare.  Even if a couple makes it 50 years, my guess is that they have a nice friendship, and have learned to look the other way, or turn off their ears at certain times.  They are done hurting each other.

The Phantom Ring

"This ring is an outward symbol of an inward commitment."
I have had four wedding bands of note: the original, slim gold band with an inscription that now seems puerile; a Tiffany Atlas for everyday from back in the roaring 90's; a handmade Tibetan silver wide band with floral engravings and an embedded speck of tourmaline, from my age of enlightenment; and the big one - the one I was going to leave to my daughter.
I figured she could put it on a chain and wear it as a pendant, as our fingers are three sizes apart.
The big ring was designed by me and crafted by a local jeweler.  It sports 25 diamonds, some small, some large. One diamond for each year of marriage.  I started it at 15 years, with diamonds from my mother's original wedding band, a couple of diamonds from earrings he had given me early on, and some from the jeweler.
It's white gold, hefty and buff.  Very subtle.  The diamonds were originally scattered on the band, but now are crowded, encrusted.
Every time I brought it in to add more stones, my friendly neighborhood jeweler would extoll its value. So many diamonds.
I wore that fucking ring maybe twice a year.
That fucking ring will now be sold and melted like the ring falling into the fire of Mount Doom with Gollum.
I will take the proceeds and buy a life.
I have stopped wearing any of my bands.  I feel like a wounded soldier with a phantom limb.  Something is missing.  In the morning I automatically reach for a band and then remember, there is no outward symbol because there is no inward commitment.

I'm beginning to understand the allure of anorexia

It's like slow suicide. 
I can't eat. 
Mind you, I'd easily go with the suicide option were it not for my children.
Efforts to wrap my head around the reality of the situation are draining,
so I'm allowing myself the luxury of not acknowledging what's ahead for
just this week.
I can't eat.

So it begins..

It appears that after 26 years and two children, my marriage is over.  My husband does not love me, and I'm not sure he ever did.
I'm a bit in shock right now, but this has been coming for a long time.  The Great Recession simply accelerated the inevitable.
How I got here, on the edge of 60 and having to start over, is something I will ponder over the next few posts....