So I had a train of thought, but I lost where the track started due to the obscuring of my line of vision back about 15 feet where the rather black smoke from my coal-run train is billowing big clouds in my way. However, I can see back about 15 feet, and what I remember is this:
I was thinking about the speech I gave at the spring banquet my high school put on. A certain line popped into my head, and I believe I can quote it almost word-for-word from my astoundingly unreliable memory.
..."[B]ut they [the teachers at my school] could offer themselves as living, breathing Band-Aids, protecting that jagged place in me until I was ready to deal with life again."
This quote was in reference to the separation and divorce of my parents my sophomore year of high school. And as I was walking around, chugging dutifully down the tracks of thought, I (dutifully) thought, "Why do we even have jagged places in us?" And that's when I reached this conclusion (one stop among many on the predetermined but completely unknown course I'm headed down):
The thing about divorce is that despite all assurances to the contrary, you have to pick sides. Perhaps not overall, but in the thousand-and-one little things during the day where the two people who raised you each want you to do a different thing, and they want you to do it because they want you to love them.
And, despite all assurances to the contrary, they want you to love them more than you love the person they were once married to.
So, every day, a thousand-and-one times, you have to decide whom you're going to hurt. You have to decide who gets to live, however momentarily, with the impression that you love them less. You get to magnify the pain they already feel, the unworthiness already festering inside of them that started growing as soon as the love inside them started dying.
The responsibility is staggering for a kid.
You've never had to choose before, because it was always a given that everyone loved everyone. You never realized that there was even a choice. Divorce shatters that illusion (or that truth, however you look at it). And the thing that really breaks you is the realization that, no matter how desperately you want it, the people you love won't ever love each other again.
So you choose. To hurt one or the other. Or simply to not love either one.
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