The "A" Word

We're fighting.
It's less often since we're getting a divorce yet it's grown in the intensity. When we talk, half the time it degenerates into a shouting match within a few minutes.

She says something that causes my heart to skip.
"What is that supposed to mean?" I ask.
"You know what it means."
"Don't fucking jerk me around, fucking tell me what you meant," I say in barely a whisper.
"I had an abortion ****** ago," she says evenly and cold as the bottom of the ocean.

The full weight of what this means staggers my mind and this space opens up inside my skull as the depth and reality of this dimension occupies all of my mind.

I get off the phone and climb into bed b/c I don't know what exactly this means.

The old me would have been on my way to my car to drive downtown to drink before the conversation ended.

As it is, I go to sleep and wake up early to train.

I look at the sky and I am unsurprised.
Like the others parts of my life...I knew this would happen somehow, some way, some day.....some time, not a possibility, but an eventuality riding in the stars above.....foretold in some wordless fashion.
I look over my life at 30 and it is exactly as I suspected.
A grown man-child struggling to understand the world surrounding him with the deep-seated suspicion that this is as close as he'll ever come to understanding the world of humanity.