I took a step that utterly changed me life, for the best. I left a loveless marriage to set out on my own. I couldn't have done it without having a friend who questioned the double standards in my life and sat up with me late at night watching Star Trek: the Next Generation and asking me hard questions I couldn't easily answer. Twenty years later, that friendship is still deep, while the marriage--whose relationship lasted six years, although the actual time married was about six months before I left--is only an unpleasant bunch of memories. Sometimes I pull out the wedding photos to prove to myself that I was that naïve, that stupid. But on December 5th, every year, I thank the Gods for my friend and for the day my brain kicked back in.
I married June 15th, 1991. I'd been the one who had pushed for the wedding. In my desperation, I felt that it was the only way to make the last few years' experience valid, as crazy as that sounds. By September I sought therapy, but the social worker was more interested in childhood relationships than the one I desperately needed to get away from. By October, I'd had my epiphany, during the famous scene in Ghost while 'Unchained Melody' played, when I realised how I had something much more bitter and sick in my life than that simple love. I announced my intent to leave. By November I was actively looking for an apartment. By happenstance the apartment that connected to my friend's came open, and on the 5th of December I moved.
So here's to freedom, and to courage, and to good friendship. I hate to think where I would have been without it. My spirit had been on its way to dying already; I had handed my personality and my brain over long before. December 5th I took it back, and although thinks have sometimes been a bit rocky on my own, I am very pleased by how things have turned out, compared to what they would have been, praise the Gods, and thank you, my dearest friend.
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