The Art Of Falling Apart

March 15th. That is the day. I remember it because it was the Ides of March, which is something from the Romans, about people doing bad things to each other and really bad stuff happening, and to be honest, the universe has a pretty weird way of doing things. I woke up at 6:47 AM to the sound of my phone shaking on the nightstand. It was not a way to wake up. It was like a mad bee stuck in a jar. I did not know it then. That shaking was the beginning of the worst day of my life. The worst day of my life is a big deal because I have had some really bad days. Like the time I got sick from food at my engagement party. My mother said something to me one Christmas that really stuck with me. She said I had let myself go. Then there was the year of 2019. I think 2019 was a year for everyone, not just me. The year 2019 was very much a lost cause for humanity. March 15th is a date that I remember. March 15th, that was something else. March 15th really hit me hard; it was different from any day. March 15th is a day that still feels really strange to me. The first message I got was from my wife. I mean my ex-wife. At 6:47 AM she was still my wife because the divorce papers had not been finalized yet. It takes time to make everything official. The pain and sadness happen right away. My ex-wife. *Can we talk tonight? I think you should move out of our place.* The message said seventeen words. These seventeen words were like seventeen knives that can hurt different parts of my body. I read the message three times. I really only needed to read it once. I guess I am the kind of person who needs to check things to make sure my life is really falling apart. Maybe I was hoping there was a mistake in the message. It would have been strange if the message said "Can we talk tonight? I think you should move to Tahiti." That would have been weird. I could have dealt with it. The message actually said "I think you should move out," and that is just final. The words "I think you should move out" are what really got to me because "I think you should move out" means it is over. I did not respond. What do you say to that? *Sure, what time works for you?* *I think that is cool. Should I pack light, or should I bring the vinyl collection?* *I understand. By the way, did you feed the cat?* I was lying there. I stayed like that for eleven minutes, looking at the ceiling and watching this crack in the plaster that really looked like the state of Florida. I had never seen it before. It is funny what you notice when your life does not make sense anymore. The crack in the plaster was very clear. The way the light was coming through the blinds was strange; it was all uneven. There was dust on the fan blades. I had been wanting to clean them for three years now. All of these things were very clear to me. They did not mean anything at the same time. The crack in the plaster, the light, the dust on the fan blades—everything was there, and it was all very strange. Then I got up because that is what people do when they have to keep going. I mean, what choice do I have, right? I get up. I take a shower. I put on some pants. I go to my job. I try to act like a person, like my life is not falling apart. Marriage is over. What do I do? I brush my teeth. I drive to the office. I sit in meetings. We talk about things that do not really matter to me. It is pretty crazy when you think about it. I guess that is just what people are supposed to do. That is the way it is. Marriage ends. You still have to go to work. You have to keep being a person even when it feels like everything is over. Life does not give you a plan when the old one does not work out. You just keep making things up as you go along until the new script of life, the new plan, feels like it is working for you again. The new script of life is what you are trying to find when the old script, the old plan, falls apart. I was working in marketing at that time. I used to work in marketing. My job was in marketing. I am saying this because something big happened. It happened four hours after I got a text from my soon-to-be-ex-wife. After I got that text, I had to go to my boss's office. My boss's name was Greg. Greg was my boss. He had a bowl on his desk. The bowl was like the ones people keep fish in. There were no fish in it. The bowl just had water and a little plastic castle in it. I asked Greg about the fish one time. I asked him what happened to the fish. He told me that the fish did not work out. Marketing was my job. Greg was my boss in marketing. I still do not know what that means. Did they quit their job? Were they fired from their position? Did they get an offer from a competing company—I mean a competing fishbowl—and that is why they left their old fishbowl for a new fishbowl? Greg asked me to sit down. I did what he said. He seemed uneasy, which was not like Greg at all. Greg was a man who was always at ease in situations that would make other people feel weird. I remembered this one time when Greg gave a presentation about working as a team. He was wearing a shirt with flowers on it and drinking a sweet cocktail. It was ten in the morning on a Tuesday. Greg was able to do things like that and still look totally fine. "Listen," Greg said. He said it in a way that made me think something was really wrong. You know, the kind of tone people use when they have to tell you some news. Like when someone has to tell you that your dog died or something. I do not actually have a dog, but I know what that tone sounds like. Then Greg told me that the company is going in a direction. The company is going to do things now. I said okay. A direction that does not include where you are standing. "Okay." They are telling me that I do not have a job at this company anymore. The company is letting me go. This means that the company is ending my job at the company. The people in charge of the company are letting me go from my position at the company. That is what I heard. The phrase "letting you go" was what they said to me. It felt like I was a balloon that they had been holding onto for a long time. They made it seem like they were doing me a favor by letting go of the balloon so I could fly around on my own and be free. It is not really like that. It is more like they set me free so I could get hurt—like a hawk could catch the balloon, which is me. "Letting you go," those are the words that they used. I nodded my head. I probably said something like "I understand" or "thank you for the opportunity." Greg gave me an envelope. I did not open the envelope that Greg handed to me. I already knew what was in the letter. It said I was being let go from my job. The letter also had some information about COBRA insurance. COBRA insurance is not for snakes, by the way. It is for people who lost their job. The letter probably had a phone number for a career counselor too. This person would ask me what my dream job is. I think that is just something people say to kids. Adults do not really get to have a dream job like that. I walked out of Greg's office. I packed my things into a box. This box was really weird because it was too small for some things and too big for others. I put a few things in the box, like a plant that I knew was dead. I had been pretending it was still alive. And I put my coffee mug in the box too. It was a mug that said "World's Okayest Employee" on it. Then I left the building. I was sitting in my car in the parking lot. I did this for twenty-two minutes. I actually counted the minutes because I had nothing else to do. My phone started buzzing. I thought to myself, it is her calling me. Maybe she is taking back what she said. Maybe all of this was a bad joke, and she is going to tell me it was a joke and say April Fools even though it is actually March. Then we can laugh about this for a long time, for years even. It wasn't her. It was my mother. *Please call me when you have a chance. Your father is in the hospital.* That is when I started laughing. Not crying, laughing. The kind of laugh that comes from inside me, a laugh that is not really right. It is the kind of laugh that makes people want to get away from me, so they cross the street to avoid me. Because what can you do when everything is going wrong? My wife left me. I got fired from my job. My father, my very stubborn and impossible father, who I have not really talked to in six years—he had a medical emergency on the same day. It is almost like it is all too much to believe. If my life were a movie, the people who review movies would probably say that it is just too obvious. My life is too much. It is like the writers are trying to tell the audience everything at once. They are not being subtle. The main character, which is me, does not need to go through every bad thing that can happen in just one day. It is not believable. My life is like a movie where the writers are hitting the character, which is me, with every possible bad thing. The critics would say that my life is not realistic. But life is not like a movie. Life does not care about how things are laid out or how the story is told. Life just keeps going all at once, and it does not think about whether or not you are ready for it. Life just happens. That is it. Life is not worried about how you feel or what you think. Life just keeps moving, and you have to deal with it. Life is real. It is not a story that someone made up. Life is what you get. You have to make the best of it. I drove to the hospital. I do not remember the drive to the hospital. I remember being in the parking garage of the hospital, and then being in the waiting room of the hospital. The middle part of the trip to the hospital is gone. This kind of thing happens sometimes to me. My brain edits out the parts of my life, the parts where I am just existing, waiting for the next disaster to hit me. There should be a word for this. The spaces between crises at the hospital. The moments when nothing bad happens at the hospital, but everything is still terrible at the hospital. The voids in my life, the gaps in my memory of the hospital visit. The waiting rooms of the soul. My father had a heart attack. It was not a bad one. They called it a minor heart attack. That does not make sense to me. You cannot be a little bit pregnant. You are pregnant or you are not. It is the same with a heart attack. Your heart stops working or it does not. You are dying or you are okay. Talking about how bad the heart attack was seems like talking about something that does not matter. My father had a heart attack. That is all that matters. He was doing all right. I mean, "all right" is a relative statement. He was alive and awake. He was being his usual self, asking for a better pillow and wondering why the nurse had not brought him ice chips yet. So he was basically being himself, the person he has always been. I was sitting in the chair next to his bed. He looked over at me. I looked back at him. Then he said, "You look like hell." I guess the hospital chair was not very comfortable, because I was feeling pretty tired. He was looking at me with a lot of concern. I was looking at him. I could see he was very sick. The hospital room was quiet. He said it again: "You look like hell." I told him that he really needed to take a look at himself. "You should see you," I said. He laughed. Then that laugh turned into a cough. This cough then turned into a grimace on his face. He said, "Fair enough." We did not talk about anything that really mattered. We did not have one of those moments like you see in movies where everyone forgives each other and they hug and cry and say all the things they should have said a long time ago. He asked me about my job. I told him it was fine, but that was not true. He asked me about my marriage. I told him that was fine too, which was also not true. Then he asked if I had been to the gym lately, and I did not have to make up a story about that because we both already knew the answer was no. When I left the hospital, it was dark outside. I do not remember when the sun went down. The whole day was a mess of bright hospital lights and bad news. I got back in my car. I drove to the place I used to live, except it was not my home anymore. The hospital was behind me. My mind was still there. My home, the place I thought of as home, was not the place I was going to be living in. Home, the idea of home, had expired. I was driving to a place that was not my home, a place that was no longer mine. I walked inside. My wife—I mean my ex-wife, or I guess I should say my soon-to-be-ex-wife—was sitting at the kitchen table. This was the table we bought together three years ago from a couple on Craigslist. They were getting divorced. Selling their stuff. We bought the table from them. We probably should have known better. We should have seen it as a sign. I mean, a table from a couple who were splitting up. It is kind of funny when you think about it. We thought it was funny at the time. The kitchen table we bought from that couple who were getting divorced. She said that we really need to talk. I know. I understand what you are saying to me about this thing. I am aware of the situation. The fact is that I know. "I'm sorry." I am aware of that. I really mean it. It took me a long time to figure this out, and I am sorry it took me so long to realize what the situation was. I am talking about the fact that I should have done something earlier. I did not do it. The thing is, I was not paying attention to the situation. That is why I am sorry it took me this long to realize what was going on. That one hurt. It got stuck behind my ribs. Would not go away. What she said, with all the nice words, was that she knew something for a long time. She had already made up her mind. I was still thinking everything was fine, still living in a dream world where everything was okay, but it was not. She was already living with what she had decided. I was still thinking that everything was going to be all right, that the problem would just go away, but it did not, and that is what made it so hard for me to accept what she said, because I was still in my own little world, my own fantasy. She was already in the real world, dealing with the reality of the situation. We had a conversation. She did most of the talking. I did the listening. This is how it usually went when we talked about things. She told me why she felt the way she did. I told her I understood why she felt that way, but to be honest, I did not really understand. We made some plans. I would stay in a hotel for a few nights until I could figure out what to do next. We would split up our things later, when we were both feeling better. We would be nice to each other. We would act like grown-ups. We would make this as easy as possible. I remember the moment I left my home. I walked out the door with a suitcase. It was full of clothes I had grabbed quickly. I was not thinking clearly. I got into my car. I just sat there. My car was still in the driveway of my home. I looked up at the window of my bedroom. The light was still on. I thought about all the nights I had spent in that bedroom. I thought about all the mornings I had woken up next to the person I loved. That person is now someone I used to know. I used to know that person well. My home is not my home anymore. I left my home. The person I loved. Then I did something that I had not done in a long time—twenty whole years, to be exact. It was a big deal for me, doing this thing that I had not done since I was a lot younger. I started to write something down. Writing is what I began to do. I had a notebook in my glove compartment. Do not ask me why. I do not know. I am not a writer. I have never been a writer. But there was the notebook, a cheap composition notebook with a black and white cover, the kind you buy at a drugstore when you need to look like you are taking notes. I opened the notebook. I wrote one sentence: *Today was a bad day. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I mean, the whole day was one big mess. Everything that could go wrong with my plans went wrong. The whole thing was a disaster from start to finish.* This thing I made was not great. It was not even good. But it existed. It showed me that I am still alive, I am still breathing, I can still write words one after the other. The fact that I made something, no matter how bad it is, means that I am still here and I can still do things like write. I kept writing. Wrote some more. My hand started to hurt and cramp up. I was writing about my wife and my job and my father. I even wrote about the fishbowl that does not have any goldfish in it. I wrote about the crack in the ceiling that looks like the shape of Florida. My feelings were all over the place when I was writing. I felt nothing, and I felt everything, all at the same time. I kept writing until I could not think of anything else to say. Then I just sat there in the quiet. And that is when it hit me—the goldfish bowl and my wife and my job and my father—they were all still on my mind. I did not feel better. But I felt like I was really there, you know, in my life. My life was a mess. I felt like I was a part of it, like I was actually living it. That meant something to me. That was a starting point for my life. This is my diary. It is also like a journal. I do not really care what you call it. This diary is not like those books where someone who has a great life tells you how to make your life great. My life is not great. I do not have things figured out. My life is a mess. It is like all these pieces are scattered on the floor. The thing is, I am not even sure if I have all the pieces of my life. My life is a big mess, and I am trying to deal with it. I am writing this diary to see if I can make sense of my life. This diary is about my life, which is a mess, and I am going to write about it. I am going to figure this thing out. Or I am going to fail very badly. Either way, I am going to write down what happens. This is my story. It is not a story about being successful. It is not a story about making things right—at least not yet. My story is about a guy—the guy is me—who lost everything in one day, and then I had to think about what I was going to do next. If the story sounds like something you would want to read, then you are welcome to read it. If the story does not sound good to you, I do not blame you for that. Honestly, I would not want to read the story if I had a choice to read something else. But here we are. Let's see what happens.