Take 10

What can be done in 10 minutes? A quick shower. Emptying the dishwasher. Dissolving my marriage.

Yep, that's right. I've waited longer for a latte at Starbucks than it took to fill out and sign the paperwork to legally undo a seven year relationship.

I sat in a chair, saying, "Yes, yes, no" to my lawyer. Scrambled through my email for answers to questions that I didn't know the answers to any more (Have I really forgotten his birthday? Already? After years of perfectly executed scavenger hunts, extravagant presents, and carefully planned baked goods, how could that detail so easily slip away?). Signed on the dotted line, four times, and that was that.

It was oddly emotional. And very strange. My lawyer asked if my ex was doing any better with the split than the last time she'd seen him, when we sold the house. I had to confess to her that she'd still talked to him more recently than I had.

When I left the office, my pre-appointment green tea still boiling hot, I started to cry. Slipping my sunglasses down over my eyes, even though it was a grey-ish day, that reaction caught me by surprise.

I sat, alone, on a bench in the far, far east of town. The same bench where I'd waited for a bus when we bought a house together almost two years earlier. It was fitting, if sad closure, for it all to come full circle there. Dreams squashed.

I don't know what I expected. Maybe I thought the process should be more monumental, more difficult, more ... something. Not so cut and dried and fast and obvious. A generic form. Signing on the line where it said "wife." As though that label still applied to me. As though I still recognized the person who belonged to that title and that name, now so unfamiliar that I kept mis-scrawling the signature. When she called out Mrs. in the waiting area, I didn't even look up. It didn't register that she could be talking to me.

But the tears. They were shocking. Were they sadness? Relief? Frustration at this seemingly endless process?

I don't know.

Realistically, at this point, it's just - finally - legalizing something that had been written long ago. Finishing something that was both wanted and necessary. Something that I've been properly excited about.

I've mourned what was, what could have been, and what should have been. I've cried for the people we were, the people we wanted to be, and the people we became.

Yet, apparently, there are still a few tears left to shed.