And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don’t regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.

Perhaps I didn’t voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending.

At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what’s flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth.

At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.

Everything I had been carting from one stage of my life to another, to remind me of me, was in the boxes that surrounded me. And there were so many of them now, just days before my thirty-seventh birthday. But so little left of me. At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.