By Harley E. Ryley

I am thirty. At this age, every other weekend holds a wedding or a hen do. It is April and I’m in a cottage with a hot tub, sharing a room with a woman I’ve just met and drinking through a penis-shaped straw. The whole group is playing a game – Scattegories, perhaps? All I know is I’ve just used the word ‘erudite’ to describe the groom and I’m feeling pretty smug.

I’m the only married woman at the table. For now. One of the girls – I don’t know her, aside from the fact we shared twelve shots last night – turns to me, wide-eyed. ‘What’s it like?’ A sheepish smile. ‘You know, being married?’ She’s getting married this year, too.

There are few things I like less than being quizzed on my marriage; I quit therapy when my therapist started asking. Last time I went out with my friends, I bought another bottle of prosecco when they asked, which, by the way, is an excellent distraction. But here, in rural wherever, with this friend-of-a-friend and her hopeful eyes, there isn’t a way out.

So, I smile. I sip from my glass of vodka. It’s like we’re both in different cages. We’re looking at each other from our own cage wondering how we got there and how the hell we’re going to get out. Or, like I’m on a train that left the station before I realised I wasn’t heading to the right destination. I’m sitting in the carriage, and I see the landscape around me, and I want to get off… Not particularly appropriate ahead of my beloved friend’s big day. I realise I’ve left it a little too long to respond. She’s still looking at me. ‘No different than before, really. The relationship is the same but with rings.’ I smile again, saccharine and utterly convincing.

It is June. I am sitting in my living room, my husband across from me on the sofa. I don’t remember how the conversation unfolds but I know how it ends: we are getting divorced. I never had this in my life plan. Despite the train, and the cage, I never thought about that word. Divorce was something messy and loud. It meant complicated childcare arrangements, bitterness and resentment.

It was something you did later, in your fifties. It wasn’t something you did to a person you still deeply cared for, respected and… still loved. It wasn’t something you decided in the space of a few hours, on your parent’s hand-me-down sofa in the house you shared together on a joint mortgage.  

It is July. I am sitting across from my parents on a different sofa, explaining that my husband and I are separating. They ask what happened. I tell them lots of things. I had been flirting with someone new. I didn’t act on it, but that still wasn’t OK. Our lives were drifting apart. We wanted different things. We were like good friends, not husband and wife. It was all amicable.

My parents are supportive. They listen with love. But they want to know the reason – the one thing that made us explode our lives. Over the course of the next few months, numerous reasons trip off my tongue over drinks with friends, in emails to colleagues, and on our joint social media posts to notify acquaintances. The responses tumble in with varied levels of inquisition. ‘But I don’t understand, what really happened?’ ‘There must have been something else. Or someone.’ ‘But you were so happy.’ ‘But you had the picture-perfect wedding.’

I realise it doesn’t matter what the reason is. Or, specifically, it doesn’t matter how I articulate to others what the reason is. Narratives are passed on, shaped and reshaped in the perpetual telling. Friends tell friends, family tell family. I hear my own story played back to me and often I don’t recognise it. Each time, it is accompanied by supportive reassurances: at least you don’t have kids, at least no one cheated, at least you’re still young enough to start again. This last one hurts the most. As though nine years of my life can be boxed off as a failed attempt.

I fall into months of despair. Dark, frantic days that I drink bottles of wine instead of eating meals and analyse every facet of my personality to find the flaw to explain why we ended up here. Why didn’t we succeed? It is amicable, and we are friends. And yet I can’t suppress the feeling that it is all my fault. Or all his fault? I want a reason, just like everyone else.

But there isn’t one. Not one I can type on this page or turn into words. As the days following the decision turn into weeks, our lives begin to diverge. He is away a lot with work and we go weeks without seeing each other, all while trying to sell the house we said we’d live in forever. Some days, I hate him for not being there. Some days, I am grateful he isn’t. I cry, but I also dance around the kitchen to Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’. Day by lengthy day, inch by crawling inch, I find that life ‘alone’ doesn’t look so terrifying. I find I don’t need to explain why. I feel it, in my soul. The inarticulable why is painted on my face and in the freeness of my limbs as I sing from my lungs.

It is March. The house is sold. I am living with my parents; soon I’ll be buying a flat of my own. My soon-to-be ex-husband is living with his new girlfriend. I’m seeing someone new. It takes so very little time for life to change, for something that was the entirety of my being to be a chapter in my story, rather than the whole damn book. People stop asking why and so do I.

I’m not starting again. Starting again would mean going back to the train station I was standing at when I was twenty-one. I can’t erase that journey, and I don’t want to. Now, I have a thousand options, a long list of destinations I could choose for my future. And because this is my metaphor, all the trains are on time, for once. I look at the board and think about where I want to go next.