Elaine Gale (5:57)
I had a dream that I was performing a story with a cardboard cutout on stage of my ex husband and the cardboard cutout was on a spring. And so in this piece I was talking about the divorce and I got really angry and I hit it and it popped down and then popped back up. And then I was telling another story and I was so angry and I kicked it and it went down and it would just pop right back up. And then in another part of the dream I was actually like lying on the stage holding on to the cutout's ankles and begging it to not leave. So I just Loved this dream. When I woke up, I'm like, wow, it just reminds me so much of divorce. Like the conflict about it. Like you love someone, you hate them, you want them to go away, you want him to stay. So I decided, you know, I'm going to ask my ex husband. I'm going to call him and ask him. You got to get permission to use someone's likeness, right? I'm going to call him and ask him if I can make a cardboard cutout for a performance. So I called him, he said yes, it's like amazing. So he also said that he would never marry another writer. And that's like, fair enough. So you know what they say? Never marry a writer, you'll get written about. And they also say, never divorce a writer because you lose control of the narrative. So basically I ended up ordering this cardboard cutout. And when I called the company, they said, well, you've got three options. It can be 3 foot tall, 5 foot tall, or 6 foot tall. And it was super tempting to save $80 and order the 3 foot tall version. I was like, $80? I could do a lot with that. But you know, the pain of divorce is life sized. You can't cut it in half or shrink it down or miniaturize it. No, I had to order the most expensive 6 foot tall life size cutout to represent this full size absence. So when I got the cutout, I set it up in the garden just to, you know, like, test it out. It wouldn't even stand up by itself, like as some exes don't, right? They need support. So I got like this piece of wood and I like used that blue tape, you know, and taped it. And then I went inside and was doing other things and totally forgot about it. And I walked outside to water the plants and like, almost had a stroke. Like, my ex is like sitting there in like my garden. So then I live in a small house in Silver Lake. So I was like, okay, I've got to put this away. So I folded it up and first I put it under my bed and I was like, that's just like feng shui wrong, right? Like, that's like not okay. So then I put in my attic. It also didn't feel right. So I finally stuck it in the shed outside, which is where it lives today. So now. Oh yeah. The other thing my ex said to me is, can you just please cover my face now? I was like, that's reasonable. So I found like a camo gator from the deep pandemic. You Know the gators, like, before we found out they didn't really work right, just like our marriage. So I put that over his face when I performed. So our divorce vibe was peaceful, though. It was a lot less House of Cards and a lot more conscious uncoupling. We did our divorce without lawyers, and we sat under a fig tree in Santa Barbara, and we decided who got what, when, why, where, how. So we had two dogs at the time, Karma and Lucky. And we both moved into separate apartments afterwards that you can only have one dog. So I got Lucky and he took Karma. Now, Karma we got right before we got married. And two months after I served him divorce papers, she died. So our Karma was complete on this marriage. I know. So he took the grill and the lawnmower. Both things scared me. I took the beach chairs, and it was okay. I also made more than him, so I had to give him half my 401k and all our savings. Now, six years ago, he had cheated on me in a midlife existential crisis, and I was gonna divorce him then, but we reconciled, did counseling together, got back together, and then I wrote a show about it, but this time it was over. It was for good. And I also handed him the keys to our shiny Infiniti, a car that he loved so much he washed it weekly. He took better care of the car than me. And I figured, why not? Every other kind of infinity I thought we had was already gone. So we met at the courthouse to sign the papers on Valentine's Day, 2020, right before the pandemic started. So it was, like three weeks before the pandemic started. Now, I was very sentimental, and I brought a Hammond's candy bar from Denver, where we first moved in together in 2004. And then I brought a gold unicorn pen for the signing. And I figured, you know, well, it could be a little bit of magic, you know, as we separated from each other, and maybe it'd be like a hope for future love for us both. The pen was a prayer. Now, I didn't mean for the prayer to get answered immediately, just for him. So we were walking to our cars, and we're hugging goodbye, and my face was near his neck and his hair and his sweater, and he just still smelled like home, you know? And then he told me, I'm leaving the next morning to go to Austin to visit my new girlfriend. And it turns out she's 17 years younger than me. And they met in their master's degree program in family counseling that I paid for for him with a second job. So I became incandescent with rage. And I would like to just astrologically explain this. I have a Scorpio moon in the 12th house, which means that I have very robust revenge fantasies. I mean, like every Halloween, if I'm not static cling, I go as Uma Thurman from Kill Bill. So I was so angry and I went home and I just. Oh, I was fuming. I couldn't even get to sleep. I took like six Benadryls and I still didn't sleep, although I didn't have any allergies. So that was great. But I had another dream where I became that goddess Kali. And his new girlfriend Julia was sitting right in front of me in a beanbag on a hamburger phone, talking to my ex husband. And I breathed fire all over it and incinerated her. Her blonde hair turned black, her heart crisp. Her fertility folded like a deck of cards. So when I woke up, I was still pissed. So I went to my. I went to the fridge and I pulled out a dozen eggs and I was dressed in my unicorn pajamas. And I drove to the Santa Barbara airport because I knew exactly where he was gonna park the Infiniti at the very back, away from all the other cars by itself. Cause he was so scared of door dings. So sure enough, I drive up, came in hot. I was listening to Taylor Swift. We are never ever getting back together at the highest, highest volume. I get out, I get some eggs, and I'm going to just like egg the shit out of his infinity. And just then there's a call on my Bluetooth and it's up so loud because the music I was listening to on the way over, I was scared it would like rustle up a, you know, Santa Barbara airport guard or something. So I answer it. It's my best friend Terri. She's like, hey, sister, I was just thinking about you. Whatcha doing? You know, there's always one friend who's just like so dialed in. Do you know what I mean? They're just. They know, like they're in the etheric realm, tracking you like a border collie. So I was like, nothing, nothing. I'm not doing a thing. Not a thing. So I finally, finally told her yes. I was in the parking lot about to commit a misdemeanor and egging my ex husband's car. So Terry, who's from Iowa, very practical. She was against the idea and told me how terrible it is to have egg yolk on a car, how terrible it is to the paint. I was like, that's the point. That's right. You got that right. So anyways, then she started talking about karma and it'll boomerang. It'll take me out. It's not a good idea. So I'm like, okay. At that point, I was a little deflated. So I got back into my car, saw the wisdom of her Iowa sensibility, and drove home. And where I took an extra large mushroom microdose just to calm down. So, I mean, I am a Taurus and a sixth generation Nebraskan. It's hard enough for me to let go of an egg, let alone a marriage. And it was really hard for me to swallow that my ex had already been in a new relationship, safely tucked in to a new relationship with someone else during the pandemic. And I was just trying to figure it all out on my own. And you know, honestly, the 17 year difference in age really grated on me. I would text him, so did she get her braces off yet? Not yet. He texts me back. It was easy for me, you know, if you're the hero of your own story. It was easy for me to make her the villain and him the villain. But I also made myself the villain. I started to get really depressed, like rocking back and forth in a corner and worried I'd always be alone and maybe I was unlovable. And I'd drink a bathtub full of chardonnay a week during the deep pandemic. I'd go to Trader Joe's and put all these snacks in my cart, right? And then put them all back. Does anybody else do that? Except for the baked cheese crunchies. Those are, like, insane. Those are great. I'd keep those. And I'm obviously at the wrong store, right? I should have been at Erewhon. Like, that's the right store for hookups, but, oh, well. So after a while, I just decided after a while, like, who did I want to become in the process of this divorce? I wanted to become better, not bitter. Ex wife was a thing I never thought I'd be. I was the child of divorced parents, and I thought I'd be married once and for life. So it was really difficult for me to adjust to this new reality. But after a while, I realized, really, our marriage isn't a failure. It's actually a container for my own evolution. And the divorce could be also. So after four years, the debris field of the divorce is clearing and I'm discovering all these, like, unexpected random kindnesses. Like, I was keeping this hand sanitizer in my medicine cabinet. This tangerine hand sanitizer from CVS that my ex husband gave me right after we signed the papers in the deep pandemic. When he got it, it was like everybody was sold out. Do you remember when you were ordering toilet paper from like South Dakota and stuff? It was like that period. So he gave me one of them and it was so touching to me. It was like his last act of protection as my husband. And I had kept it, it was empty and it was still in my medicine cabinet and I finally threw it away. And also I went to the beach this summer and I had one of our Tommy Bahama beach chairs. Cause I got those in the divorce, right? So I'm at the beach and I'm sitting there and I'm journaling, whatever, and I go to leave and I go to shut the Tommy Bahama beach chair. And I don't know how. Oh my God, they're so hard to shut. Like even a doctor can't shut those fuckers, right? They're so hard. Anyway, and I realized every single time he'd gone to the beach for 17 years, he'd carried all the stuff there and he'd taken it all down and carried it back to the car. And I sat there and googled how to close a Tommy Bahama beach chair and I found like 100 videos, thankfully. And I cried again, feeling his full size absence. So the divorce has changed me. I don't take love for granted. I know that loss is always on the way. And I'm slower, I'm sweeter, and I'm simpler. Like I lie around and I just think about like how great corduroy is, right? Like it's so great. And I watch like YouTube videos for hours of giraffes eating romaine leaves. I mean, it's like mesmerizing. And it reminds me to eat s'more salad. And also I was studying forever those pictures of the spiders. Do you remember when NASA gave drugs to spiders and then took pictures of the webs that they wove? Does anybody remember that? There's like mescaline and then there's like ayahuasca and psilocybin. So I'd stare at those forever. You know, love changes us. Even love that ends the web I weave now is different because of our marriage. And really we could learn a lot from spiders when we're not so scared of them, right? I mean, they don't care if you knock down their web. They just redo it somewhere else. They're fine. So our wedding date was October 13th. And this fall would have been our 16th anniversary. But does it count when you're not counting anymore? I found also our wedding album, which I had not looked at in ages, which I also kept, and I was looking through it. And the very last picture in the wedding album is a picture of us blackened out in silhouette with the colorful Arizona sunset in the background. And it was supposed to be, you know, this symbol of our eternal love. And instead it's become this mirror cutout. Our marriage cut right out from the center of our lives. And he replaced that. He replaced me in the cutout right away with somebody else. But for me, it's a little more complex. Like sometimes it feels like infinity, like so many possibilities. Other times it feels like a black hole, you know, of the past tugging on me. Sometimes I feel empty and sometimes I feel emptied in a great way. But I'm still so hopeful. Like last week I was walking around the reservoir, the Silver Lake reservoir, and I saw all these empty spiderwebs, just kind of like in the wind. And they were so beautiful and so complex and abandoned, just like marriage. And for me, I couldn't help think about the spiders with a smile on my face and the better place that I hoped that they had all created for themselves. Thank you.
