potholes in memory lane

As I've mentioned on Saint Nobody, I'm spending a little time in Cincinnati, where I went to graduate school in the '90s. It's also where I met Bob (while he was playing a gig at Kaldi's in Over the Rhine), where we fell in love and moved in together and got married.

Our first apartment together was in the Clifton neighborhood, near the university campus. During my visit I'm staying in the same general area--and I realized last night coming back from a nice evening of revelry with my fellow poets that this is first time I've been back to Clifton since Bob and I separated. The car climbed the hill towards the Gaslight district, on streets I'd walked so many times. Then a bus drove by, with "Mount Airy" lit up in capital letters--its destination. Our wedding was in Mount Airy Forest, a lovely park on one of Cincinnati's famous "seven hills."

At that point it really hit me, bringing on some pretty intense emotions--fortunately, one of my poet friends (whom I'd just gotten to know) took me to Graeter's for some ice cream, and was very sweet to me when i broke down crying in the middle of the sidewalk on Ludlow Street.

Black raspberry chocolate chip slid deliciously over my tongue, as it always had, but I couldn't finish even one small scoop. It wasn't until later, when I talked to Bob on the phone, that I started to feel a little better. As we talked--catching up on what the kids are doing, etc.--I told him about the memories flooding back and of course started crying again. He listened. He said he understood. He said he was sorry.

"Is everything going to be OK?" I asked, as I had so many times before. I recall early on in our marriage teaching him to just say, "Everything's going to be OK" whenever I was freaking out over something, whether or not he believed it to be true. He complied, and it evolved into "Everything IS OK."

"Yes," he said last night. "It's going to be OK."

It's so strange to be in this place--to have someone who cares about me, who even tells me he loves me unconditionally, but who is not a partner in the same sense as he was for over a decade. I'm grateful that we communicate so well most of the time--for the kids' sake if nothing else. But it will definitely take a little (or a lot) longer before the pain of losing the marriage heals more completely.

More and more I see how grief is not a linear process--it does loop-de-loops and sometimes you feel as if you're right back where you were before, but truly there is a forward motion. There is no way to hurry the healing. But it will happen. It is happening. Everything is OK.