Copyright 2010, TF (teviothome@gmail.com)

THE END OF A MARRIAGE

A short story inspired by watching the Korean Drama "World of the Married" 

How can I convey to you that knowingness, that sense of unreality, at the moment of the end of what I thought was "our marriage" but was really just "my marriage" which I lost?

It was midnight and I was standing in a telephone booth in the middle of an open square surrounded by low wooden houses - in Kyoto, Japan.

I called my husband in New York. We both lived and worked at a university there and stayed in the faculty wing of a student dormitory. 

I was studying Japanese dance in Kyoto that summer - so totally foreign to my years of Western dance but so surprisingly comfortable to me. People I met that summer would say things like, "Welcome back! I think we met in a past life." Dressed in full makeup, wig and $14,000 kimono for the final recital after weeks of sweaty work, a professional male performer looked at me in shock. He said, "Except for the blue eyes, you are Japanese."

And the man who was my husband told me that night over all-too-memorable long distance call that a graduate student --  a lovely blonde girl whose big breasts I had envied, a young woman who had been cleaning our apartment for us and had been inspired to arrange all the books by size on the shelves - so not the kind of brain that I understood - this woman had moved into our apartment. She would share the rent. And unspoken but later confirmed, she would share what had been "our" bed.

And the wave of knowingness came up. I knew with deep certainty that it was the moment of the end of the marriage. And at that very moment, I heard the sound of bells. Through the square came a parade of maybe 25 children. It was midnight - why were children out at that hour? They held up a box on poles on their shoulders. Inside I understood was a god who was being transported from one shrine to another. 

A god passed by me...or passed me by.

Like me, I thought then. Transported from who I was - or at least who I thought I was - to an entirely new set of circumstances. 

I stood in the phone booth caught between the two worlds: the American life I had known in New York and the strange world that I barely knew but loved in Japan. I did not and could not understand either one. 

I did not know where in the world I would ever fit. Or where I would ever find home again.

--- April 3, 2023 remembering a day in November, probably in 1992.