Member-only story
Listening to that Small Voice Inside Me
The one that knows things long before I’m willing to face them
I got married young, too young, the first time. I was twenty-two; there are definitely people in this world old enough to get married at twenty-two, but I was not one of them.
It was a tumultuous marriage. It barely lasted two years, though it would have been even shorter if I’d been willing to listen to what I already knew.
Heck, if I’d been willing (or able) to do that, we wouldn’t have married in the first place.
But we did, because I was in love, and I was sure, so sure, that this love was different and real and true. And it was! I had never had a relationship like that one. There was so much that was so good about it, even to the end.
The things that weren’t good, though; maybe such things are fixable in marriages that weren’t ours, but they didn’t get fixed in ours, and at some level, I knew it. Those things were always difficult, and then they became unbearable, and then I asked for a divorce.
Even in the early days of that marriage, I had a line that would run through my head. Do you do this too, or is it just writers? I narrate the story of my life, internally; I make sense of what’s going on in my life by telling it back to myself. I…
