To my new friend.
It sucks going through a divorce. There’s nothing pleasant about it and it’s a tough row to hoe no matter how you slice it.
Bucking up and keeping a smile on your face when dealing with your ex-partner and keeping it together for the kids is the real tightrope act and doesn’t make any of it easier. In fact, it makes it so much bloody harder.
A little story.
I remember the first few weeks on my own. My little house was nearly empty. I let my ex take nearly everything. Not out of martyrdom but because she had the kids, I wanted them to have as normal a life as possible and I had the house (way too complicated to go into here).
I think I just had a couch, a little tv from boxes of stuff that had been in storage during our marriage. In those first bleak days, I remember turning my little tv up really loud to drown out the echoes of my kid’s voices that I heard when they weren’t around.
I turned their room into a little stuffed animal shrine in anticipation for their semi-weekly weekend stays. I assessed my material needs and slowly started to buy necessary items while licking my financial wounds. But it seemed like the emptiness was vast. I spent a lot of time out with friends before coming home late at night and turning the tv up loud to chase away the silence.
One day, I was rummaging through the storage items and ran across my ancient reel-to-reel recorder and a stack of tapes. I hadn’t thought about it in nearly a decade. I used to make audio tape collages and would experiment with sounds and tape manipulation. I had thought I had gotten rid of that stuff and also the desire to make audio art. Dads don’t do that kind of stuff, do they?
Out of boredom and curiosity, I spooled up one of the reels - the oldest looking one. After years of storage and neglect at my ex-inlaw’s storage room, the old tape machine didn’t seem to want to come to life again. It slowly came around as its vacuum tubes started glowing.
Suddenly, from the tape came a glorious noise that I thought had been lost nearly 10 years earlier. It was a bizarre, one-shot improvisational recording I had made with a guitar and digital delay device, played over the top of some audio from the tv. It was perfect and could never be duplicated in a million years, but over the ensuing years I thought it had been lost or accidentally recorded over. I used to lament the loss of that particular recording and subsequently quit doing audio art altogether. But here it was! It was music to my ears and filled the seemingly-cavernous empty room with gorgeous noise! I remember jumping around my living room with idiot-glee.
I found my lost self on a piece of oxidized 1/4″ tape.
I had reconnected with my past and remembered who I was.
From then on out, I knew everything was going to be alright.
You’re going to be alright, too.
