2003-01-02 - 8:47 p.m.

Or have you found yourself a girlfriend, probably at the end of the summer, so that you can immerse yourself in her celebration and pretend, just for a day or two, that all is right in your world? That latter's more likely, I doubt you'd want to sit at a bar on Christmas, face to face with your own failures. And I write this, now, intellectualizing it,merely observing and commenting, but on Christmas I mourned. Not you, but all I thought we would be. It was a long deep ache, felt only in solitude, and I missed the good things, too. I missed the house decorating, and the entertaining, and the family, even all of his fractured, damaged branches of what was family only by genetics.

When I left him, when it was finally over, I talked to my in-laws, his stepfather and his second wife, and she said to me, "It's for the best. You don't belong here, in this mess. You didn't inherit a life like this. Me, I don't know any better. I had a shitty childhood and a hard life, and this man, with all his faults, is sober and he has a job and he doesn't hit me, and that's just about bliss to me. But you should never settle for that." And I cried then, lost it, and she held me and stroked my hair, and they were my family, too. We created a family of sorts, I extended to them the hand their son couldn't, and we made rituals and celebrated holidays and spoke frankly. And with him, necessarily, went them. We have spoken, infrequently, and always with love and good wishes and good intentions. But we're no longer part of each others lives, and although I understand and accept that, it doesn't seem fair. He already took so much.

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