Person eating pizza from a box | Source: Pexels
“Let’s move on, Martin. I’m ready to move on.”
Then I opened the forms we had discussed a few weeks earlier, filled out the information, clicked “Confirm,” and sat down.
The coffee next to me had gone cold. I stared at the surface until I saw my reflection, hazy, tired, and slightly dazed.
Neil walked in while I was still sitting. He raised his eyebrows at the sight of the pizza box.
A woman sits lost in thought at the kitchen table | Source: Midjourney
“Breakfast of champions, Iris?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
I watched as he grabbed a glass of juice and leaned against the kitchen counter. He had a huge smile on his face, as if he was having the time of his life.
“You’re not angry about yesterday anymore, are you?”
A glass of fruit juice on the kitchen counter | Source: Midjourney
I looked at him and felt something click in my chest. It wasn’t pain or anger. It was just a final surge of confidence.
Later he told everyone we got divorced “over a stupid fried chicken.”
He always said it with a little laugh, as if it were absurd. As if I were absurd.
But it was never about the chicken.
Smiling man sitting on sofa | Source: Midjourney
It was a timer. It was the 10-minute rule. And 22 other rules he came up with. It was constant corrections, reworded emails, clothes he didn’t like, and the tone with which he criticized.
It was about how Neil used words like “irrational” and “hysterical” to describe me. It was about how politely he made me feel like I was always a little wrong.
I gradually became so small that I forgot what it meant to take up space.
A woman sits on the stairs with her hands on her head | Source: Midjourney
And I was tired of forgetting.
The divorce was neither quick nor easy. Neil questioned almost everything.
“You’re wasting 20 years over a misunderstanding,” he said to me as I put the last of the books away from my shelf.
