Reflections on Hope and Illusion
Soundtrack: "Friends, Lovers or Nothing" by John Mayer
I remember the pasture most vividly when I’m not trying to. It’s not a scene I conjure on demand—it finds me in the in-between spaces. Folding laundry. Driving to work. Standing in the frozen aisle at the grocery store, my fingers trailing over bags of peas. And then I’m there again: June light fading into dusk, frogs singing from the edges of a pond, a full strawberry moon rising like a blessing over our shoulders. Two walnut trees framed the space where we stood, and between them we lit candles in mason jars. I remember her eyes, the flicker of flame in the glass, the sound of crickets starting their chorus. I remember thinking: this is the beginning of the rest of my life.
And in some ways, it was.
We were married by a friend—my words, my ceremony, my heart on my sleeve in a way I rarely allowed. Her mother made the cake. My father cooked the meal. My brother and mother helped gather all the needed bits and pieces, building something small and sacred out of near nothing. There was no rehearsal. No grand procession. Just family. Just light. Just the soft hush of twilight and a rush of certainty I mistook for permanence.
It hadn’t started that way. When I first proposed, she said no.
She didn’t say it cruelly—just honestly. At the time, I thought it meant we were done. I was 29 and ready to move forward, to build a family, to begin. Her hesitation felt like the collapse of a chapter I wasn’t ready to end. But that same night, she reconsidered. Said yes. Maybe out of love. Maybe fear of loss. Maybe both. And maybe that’s where the illusion began: the idea that our readiness would naturally align if we just wanted it enough.
Weeks passed. Then months. By June we still hadn’t set a date. I felt the edges fray. I loved her—but I also wanted motion, structure, the next threshold. After another conversation left us circling the same indecision, she finally said, “Let’s get married next Sunday.” I said yes. I was so ready to say yes. I threw everything into place with the full force of someone who needed to believe it would work if we just moved fast enough.
And truthfully, it did work. For a time.
We made a home, first in a small apartment, then in a modest house. We adopted a cat. We built a rhythm, one that pulsed with real affection and moments of quiet joy. There were holidays, small road trips, the excitement of sharing a life together. I loved her. And I believe she loved me.
But somewhere beneath that love was a question neither of us had truly answered: were we building the same future?
I wanted to be a father. I had wanted it and had made that clear. But for her, it was something she thought she could promise—but over time, that absence became a silence too large to ignore. Our timelines were off. Our longings began to diverge. And still, I tried to believe that if we just stayed kind, if we just stayed good to one another, things would find their way back to a shared story.
But that’s not how time works. Not with people. Not with love. Not even with strawberry moons.
Looking back, I can see how much I wanted the story to be true—the one I was telling myself. That love, properly tended, could solve misalignment, could solve anything. That being a good man, a present partner, a hopeful planner could carry us through uncertainty. But what I called hope was also, in some ways, illusion. And illusions, like frost at dawn, are beautiful—but they melt when touched by the weight of day.
Like the image in Elioth Gruner’s Spring Frost, there’s a peace in the scene that conceals the early toll of effort. The man walking through morning light with cattle is doing something ordinary, even sacred—but also something that cannot last long. Frost is a fleeting grace. So was our marriage.
Still, I return to it—not with bitterness, but with tenderness. I return to it because it was real. Not permanent. Not flawless. But real. Like the kind of love John Mayer tries to define in Friends, Lovers or Nothing: not the kind that can survive in the blurry space in between, but the kind that insists on clarity—even if that clarity hurts: a love that changes, that softens at the edges, that leaves its shape in your memory long after it’s gone.
I believed in the life we were making. And for a while, we made it even if the cost what high.
Reflections on Avoidance and Denial
Soundtrack: "No Hard Feelings" by The Avett Brothers
There is something cruel about clarity arriving late. It doesn’t come in the moment you need it—it arrives months or even years after the decisions are made, after the damage has settled into routine. I spent a long time trying not to see the slow unraveling of my marriage. I filled that space with everything but honesty: school, politics, long work hours, video games, more and more distractions dressed up as life.
In 2016, I went back to school. It was a decision I made with a straight face and a good explanation: career growth, intellectual fulfillment, leadership development. All true. But beneath those reasons lived a quieter, more evasive truth: I didn’t know how to be at home. I didn’t know how to sit in the silence that had grown between us. I was afraid of what would rise to the surface if I stopped moving.
I ran for city council next. Another noble pursuit. Civic engagement. Community improvement. Again, it sounded good when I said it out loud. But privately, I knew I was building walls. I was terrified of what I might learn about myself if I wasn’t too busy to notice.
Psychologists talk about avoidance not just as procrastination, but as a fear response. We avoid things that threaten our self-concept. We delay truth to preserve the stories we need to believe. I was in love with a version of our life that had already faded away. But the grief hadn’t caught up yet, so I built shields of productivity. I drank more. Not in public ways—but just enough to numb the evenings. I buried disappointment in accomplishment. I kept the mask on, even when no one was watching.
"No Hard Feelings" captures something I couldn’t say at the time: the quiet surrender to what’s already unraveling. It doesn’t rage or blame. It accepts. It mourns the loss while still holding a gentle kind of hope. That maybe, after all the mistakes and missteps, we could part without bitterness. That maybe love could fade without turning cruel.
And I was lying—to her, yes. But mostly to myself. I told myself I was patient. That we were taking our time. That she just needed space to grow into the future I envisioned. But I wasn’t waiting. I was slowly erasing the part of me that wanted more, because asking for it meant risking the relationship entirely. And I wasn’t ready to lose the idea of us. Not yet.
There’s a kind of depression that doesn’t look like what you think. It’s not weeping on the bathroom floor. It’s not sleeping for days. It’s putting on your clothes, driving to work, cracking jokes at meetings, and then standing in the kitchen at night with a drink in your hand, wondering why you feel empty. It’s a sadness that whispers instead of screams. A low hum of hopelessness you learn to mistake for quiet.
I didn't want to face that silence. So I stayed loud. I stayed busy. I stayed "fine."
But slowly, the silence began to win. It seeped into the cracks between my efforts. It wrapped around my ankles. It filled the space between our words. And even though I didn’t admit it then, some part of me already knew: we were slipping out of sync, and no amount of motion could hold us together.
I wish I had told the truth sooner. Not to save the marriage. But to save both of us the years spent pretending we were still inside a story that had quietly ended.
Reflections on Grief Without Death
Soundtrack: "Poison & Wine" by The Civil Wars
Divorce is strange because nothing dies—at least not in the traditional sense. There’s no funeral. No flowers. No eulogy. Just a slow erosion of shared language and private rituals. You stop finishing each other’s sentences. You stop folding their laundry. You stop making two cups of coffee in the morning. You learn how to live in the absence of a person who still exists.
And maybe that’s the hardest kind of grief. Not the kind that comes with mourning clothes and casseroles, but the one that arrives in the space where love used to live. An ambiguous loss. A living absence. A door that is technically still open, but no one walks through anymore.
We stayed friends. That sentence feels both true and impossible. It was easier to be kind than to be strangers. Easier to text about the cats than to say nothing at all. But friendship after love is complicated. The lines blur. You try to hold the past gently, but sometimes it cuts. A shared joke becomes a reminder of something you no longer share. A casual check-in becomes a floodgate. You wonder what it means when they still remember your favorite tea or send you a picture of the moon. You wonder if it means anything at all.
I think part of me believed we could reframe what we had. That we could rewrite the story in a gentler genre—take the romantic tragedy and turn it into a quiet friendship arc. But the truth is, we were never meant to be just friends. And trying to fit our history into that box only made it harder to carry.
COVID made everything worse. Isolation blurred time. Grief had nowhere to go, so it settled into the walls. I didn’t just lose her—I lost the rhythm of companionship, the weight of her presence in the room. And without distractions, all I could hear was the echo of that absence.
Psychologists call it attachment grief—the mourning of a bond that isn't severed by death, but by divergence, distance, or ambiguity. It's the grief that lingers in unfinished conversations and lingering connections. Unlike bereavement, where social rituals help guide us through mourning, attachment grief offers no such structure. The person you're grieving still exists, sometimes even still loves you in a way, but no longer fulfills the role they once did in your life. It’s a wound that remains open because there is no cultural script for how to say goodbye to someone who hasn’t gone.
You find yourself caught in an emotional holding pattern. Each interaction—however small—stirs hope, confusion, or longing. A song recommendation, a birthday text, a comment on a shared memory: these become threads in a fabric you're no longer allowed to wear, but cannot throw away. The attachment persists, but the context dissolves. And in that space, grief morphs into something chronic—soft, shapeless, hard to name. It doesn’t demand a response, but it refuses to leave the room.
This kind of grief reshapes you slowly, because it forces a continual negotiation of boundaries and identity. Who are you to them now? Who are they to you? And what do you do with the love that still stirs but no longer has a home?
And still, I’m grateful. We didn’t become enemies. We didn’t burn it all down. But peace isn’t the same as healing. And love doesn’t end with a court date. It unspools, slowly. Quietly. In a hundred unspoken gestures that once meant "I see you," and now mean nothing.
Or maybe they still mean something. I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is this: I carry no hard feelings, but I carry something. Not resentment. Not regret. Just the quiet ache of something once beautiful that couldn’t stay.
Looking Ahead: The Discipline of Being Honest with Myself
Soundtrack: "Ends of the Earth" by Lord Huron
The hardest truth isn’t that the relationship ended. It’s that, for a long time, I chose not to see the ending coming. I told myself I was being patient. That I was giving things time. That she would come around. That our paths would realign. But underneath it all, I was afraid—afraid that if I admitted we were drifting, I’d have to let go of a dream I had already built furniture inside.
And that’s the thing about illusion: it only works if you don’t look directly at it.
So much of what I called hope was actually resistance. I resisted change. I resisted grief. I resisted honesty. I filled my time with noble work, poured myself into goals that looked good on paper, because the alternative was silence—and I knew what lived in that silence. I knew it would ask things of me I wasn’t ready to give. And so, I drank. I avoided. I survived.
But survival is not the same as living. And living—truly living—requires telling the truth. Even to yourself. Especially to yourself.
I still think about the pasture. I don’t visit it, not physically, but it visits me. Sometimes it’s dusk again, and the candles are flickering. Sometimes it’s morning, and the grass is wet with frost. Sometimes the trees are bare. Sometimes they are blooming. But the walnut trees are gone now—taken down by a storm. I have several cut pieces of them on my porch, standing beside my front door like silent witnesses. In a way, I’m still living in that story. The place no longer looks the same, but it lives on in me. Always, it feels like a place just outside of time.
That image reminds me that beauty isn’t invalidated by impermanence. That moment was real. That love was real. And the fact that it didn’t last forever doesn’t erase what it gave me. I’m a better man today—not in spite of the marriage, or the divorce, but because I walked through both.
I’ve stopped asking whether we should have stayed together. The more honest question is: who did I become by walking through that fire? And who am I still becoming?
The mirror, this month, shows me a man who finally stopped trying to write over the past and started learning from it. A man who doesn’t numb the ache, but listens to it. Who no longer confuses denial for optimism. Who understands that love doesn’t have to last forever to matter—and that clarity, however painful, is its own kind of mercy.
I don’t know what the future holds. But I do know what I want: to love again, but with open eyes. To be a father, if that’s still in the cards, but I worry less about that now. To build something not from fear or longing, but from truth. To say what I mean before it’s too late.
Maybe that’s all discipline really is: not the cold rigidity of rules, but the warmth of daily, deliberate honesty.
To wake up each day, look into the mirror, and speak plainly to the person I find there.