24/5/2014 Sunny (12am)

Dear Diary,

I have been to the support meetings, before. They are held in community center conference rooms with dirty floors and uncomfortable chairs that seat women who never used to smoke but do now. For an hour and a half each week, they light each other’s cigarettes and complain about being alone.

On my way downtown, I get stuck in traffic behind a tow truck with a prophetic license plate that reaffirms my greatest fear: YOUNEXT. I am struck by the severity of the capital letters and lack of spacing. It seems like a threat. Distracted, I run a red light. I almost laugh out loud at the irony, but then I’m in the parking lot of the community center and the license plate suddenly seems from another lifetime.

Inside, the conference room is crowded and there is an air of anguish. There are at least fifteen women lingering around the coffee stand- one is pregnant, two are in business suits and seven are smoking. All of them are chatty with sad eyes, eager to share their grief. I want not to understand them, but I do.

The mediator of the meetings is a psychologist named Marion whose husband owns a sports bar downtown. I know this because I have seen them there together. He is balding and wears an Eagles’ jersey every Sunday during football season. Last year, Kai and I went to a birthday party for one of his coworkers there and I watched him argue with Marion over the counter. I couldn’t make out what they were saying to each other from across the room but their words were heated. When she left, he threw his hands up in the air, drew beer from the tap and took heavy gulps until his shoulders slumped, tension released.

Marion calls for the start of the meeting a few minutes after I arrive and everyone takes a seat in the dilapidated folding chairs, which have been set up in a lopsided circle. The meeting opens with talk of a brunch to honor the husbands of women who are not as lucky as I am. I think about what a funny word “luck” is and don’t realize that Marion is calling my name.

“What?” I ask, my tone more hostile than I intended.

“Do you think you can bring the fruit salad to the brunch?”

I nod complacently, stiffening when she adds, “Maybe you should write that down somewhere, just so, you know, you don’t forget.”

The next forty minutes of the meeting pass quickly, I distract myself with counting the cars that drive by on the main road beyond the community center. I tally their colors, makes and models, dissolving myself in keeping track of the numbers.

Finally, Marion announces that we will end the meeting with a “Management Exercise,” assignments designed to help us redirect any apprehension we may have about our husbands. I have learned that it is okay to feel angry. I have learned that it is okay to feel frustrated. I have learned that it is okay to feel abandoned. No one says if it is okay to feel sad and I wonder if that is because there is no exercise to manage sadness, no way to change it into something worthwhile.

Today the exercise is comprised of writing letters to our husbands.

“You don’t have to send them,” Marion tells us, “Just be honest and say what you mean. Sometimes you don’t know how you feel until you have a chance to let it out!”

Her tone is cheery and upbeat and I want to ask her, right then, what she and her husband were fighting about that evening in the bar and if afterwards, she went home and wrote him a letter.

The impulse passes and Marion hands us promotional pens and slips of binder paper. I wonder what Kai would think if he saw me here, the only one not writing a letter in this misshapen circle of women. The thought makes my cheeks flush. I first met Kai in a Poetry workshop in college. After the first class, he told me my words defined me and asked me out to dinner. After my first book was published, he said it again, Your words define you. But what would he say if he knew I hadn’t written since the day his heart didn’t belong with me. A deadline from my publisher looms, but I have no interest in even beginning research for a new project. When I sit down to write some mornings, my mind gets tangled and goes blank. Words feel heavy and opaque, as if they have drifted beyond me, out of reach.

Who am I without words? I want to ask Kai. Am I indefinite? Unreal?

I realize that several moments have passed and I am still posed with the pen over my blank paper. Around me, other women scribble furiously and a few sniffles escape into the silence. I stifle a sigh, sketch a palm tree and play a game of tic-tac-toe with myself, allowing the X’s to win.

After she’s resumed the meeting, Marion implores us, “What feelings did this exercise bring up for you?”

Most of the women clamor at a chance to share their responses with the group. They read with shaky hands and stilted voices. One woman cries openly, unabashedly. That’s the thing about having a husband who doesn’t belong with you- it makes you selfish, hungry f