The Split

CW: Suicide, gore        

   At some point, as I wandered the winding trail that makes up my life, I made a decision—the way we all have, and maybe one like all the rest—that kicked me out of the path I’d scored for myself in the dirt. Maybe one day a red light came on a little too fast and I had to stomp on the pedal a little harder than I have before. Maybe I fished a grocery receipt out of my cupholder and realized that the money was always supposed to end up there anyway. Maybe it was as simple a thing as looking in the damn mirror and deciding that my life couldn’t keep going the same way, even if it wasn’t really going all that bad.

           Whatever it was, whenever, time drew itself a line in the sand, and I wandered over to the other side. If you could draw up a chart of it, of the old path and where it broke away into the road I took and the road I didn’t take, I imagine you could follow that untraveled road all the way down, winding through every crooked corner it touched and learning all the bits of it I never got to explore. I’ve always liked to think that I’m on the path that’s dreamed about on the other side, but then I wonder if thinking of the other side at all, if wondering at all, means I’ve had it backwards. Is it always ungrateful? Just to wonder?

           The first time my paths split takes no thinking—neither to find nor to justify. I was barely out of college, and the girl I was chasing was still there. She ended up finishing her two-year degree just in time for everything to boil over—thank God for small miracles—and I had a steady enough job to support a growing family. That’s what we called it from the start, even though we weren’t married and weren’t lined up to be. My life split in two when she came to me that night, almost three in the morning in her sister’s borrowed pajamas, crying words that didn’t sound like anything at all. I didn’t need the words, and she didn’t need me to tell her that I’d be sticking by her. Not after I held her the way I did. I chose the right end of the split, then, and there’s no question on that.

           I did what any father would’ve done, I’d think, especially one with not much more to offer than a decent heart and laboring hands. I took to work, picking up shifts anytime I could, begging for a few extra hours and making those hours worth the eventual “sure.” I worked us into a good place, our growing family, and after the baby came, I kept at it. Babies aren’t cheap, and they don’t get any cheaper with the years. I watched her grow with my hand on the doorknob, and now that she’s too old for me to lift her (and maybe I’m too old for it, too), I don’t think I ever held my daughter without my work boots on.

           Like I said, maybe it was a moment of near-death, or some busy morning where I caught sight of the mirror and glimpsed death anyway. Whatever, whenever, I got it together enough to realize that I was working for a family that hardly ever saw more than the back of my head. I quit my job after all that time, dropped it like an old rag, and found one that wouldn’t keep me past dinnertime. I didn’t make as much, and sometimes the dollar felt a little tight, sometimes enough to keep my wife and I awake whisper-shouting in the kitchen, but we were mostly comfortable, and I knew the names of all my daughter’s best friends.

           On another path, one where I kept to my job and saw my girl on the way out the door every day, maybe I wouldn’t have even been home during those whisper-shout fights. Those kinds of things never end in resolution. They end in cold nights of unrestful sleep and fake-warm mornings. Maybe my workday would’ve started before those mornings. Maybe I would’ve been on the clock today, and I wouldn’t have been home early to be on the other end of a shouting match, without whispers, about why the office had wrapped everything up before five o’clock when my hours had been short anyway. Maybe I would’ve never heard—never had time to hear—my wife ever speak of divorce. Maybe things would’ve been different.

           Maybe, on the other side, I would’ve come home on a late night after a twelve-hour shift and found her in our bed with another man. Maybe things wouldn’t have been different at all. And maybe it doesn’t matter, because there’s no way to turn around and check that other path, no way to claw my way back to whatever the damn breaking point was to begin with. I was on this side, and on this side, she said we’d split even. The house with me. Our daughter with her.

           Maybe both paths lead here, with my wife’s blood under my fingernails and my daughter on the way home from the bus stop. Is it always ungrateful to wonder? To almost hope?

           The paths split again, here, and I’m almost sure of the best way forward: the path where I don’t live to see my daughter hate me. Maybe I’ll get another shot next time around and do things right. Still I wonder if I ever had any real choice, and with the knife back in my hand, I pray to something I washed off of my heart a long time ago. I pray that it always ended here, that I didn’t take every wrong turn along the way.

           I make the cut, no more dramatic than slicing open a watermelon, and as I fall off every path for good, my head drops to my chest. It’s funny, almost, or I wish it was.

           I’m still in my work shoes.