Making Choices

I choose you.

I said that to Kyle last year, on the way home from a concert.

I was sharing my experience of getting divorced. I felt at once excited by the possibilities of the new perception I had of my life, while feeling devastated at the loss of my marriage which I have viewed as my single largest life failure.

I have not felt that I was free to make my own decisions, to forge my own path, to go my own way. This divorce has altered my perception because I now realize that those things have always been true.

I have spent so much of my life scapegoating my house or my wife or my job or my family or my debt or anything other than myself for being trapped in an unhappy life circumstance.

With Kyle I do not share a home. I do not share finances. I do not share children. I do not have any of the societal trappings/regalia/indicators of a relationship with him. And without those things I would have been tempted to feel that we don't have a "real" relationship.

And yet I am tied to him as surely as I have ever been tied to anyone.
I choose this relationship, every single day.