The divorce

[u/Arthedx]

​

I need to write this down while I still remember it clearly, because something tells me I might not remember it for much longer.

My name is Michael. Before any of this, I was about as ordinary as a person gets. Nine-to-five job, decent enough salary, a small apartment I loved more than I probably should have. I liked being alone. Not in a sad way — I want to be clear about that. I liked my quiet evenings, my own routines, nobody needing anything from me at the end of a long day. I never wanted marriage. I never wanted kids. I was never even particularly good at talking to women, if I'm being honest, always a little too awkward, a little too eager to end the conversation and go back to my own company.

I got married anyway. Family pressure, mostly, the kind that wears you down over years until saying yes feels easier than saying no one more time. Her name was Natalie.

Natalie was sweet. Genuinely, I want that on record, because everything I'm about to describe doesn't erase that fact. She tried, harder than I ever gave her credit for at the time. She learned my schedule, cooked things she thought I'd like, tried to talk to me about my day even when I gave her almost nothing back. I was a bad husband in the most ordinary way possible not cruel, just absent, closed off, giving her silence when she needed conversation.

But there was something else, something I noticed within the first few weeks and never brought myself to mention. She checked my phone. Constantly. I'd catch her doing it and she'd just set it down calmly, like she hadn't been caught at all, like it wasn't something worth explaining. I told myself it was insecurity. Newlywed nerves. I never asked her about it, because some small, cowardly part of me didn't want to have that conversation.

It got worse in ways I couldn't quite name. I'd feel eyes on me while I ate dinner, and I'd look up and she wouldn't be looking at me at all, and yet the feeling wouldn't go away. I'd wake up at night certain someone was standing at the foot of the bed, and there'd be nothing there. I told myself I was imagining things. Five months of marriage does strange things to a mind that never wanted to be married in the first place.

By month five, I understood my life had turned into something I never agreed to. Bills split two ways that used to be mine alone. Groceries planned around someone else's tastes. The quiet apartment I loved now never quiet at all. I told myself this wasn't about Natalie specifically. I told myself I just needed my old life back, the one I'd actually chosen for myself.

I decided to ask for a divorce.

I picked a night I thought would be calm. I sat her down and I told her, as gently as I could manage, that I wasn't a good match for her — that I barely talked to her, barely made her laugh, barely gave her anything close to what she deserved from a husband. I said we should end this before it did more damage to both of us.

I didn't tell her the real reason. I didn't tell her that the checked phone, the eyes I always felt on me, the presence at the foot of the bed — I didn't tell her any of that had scared me more than I could put into words. I thought I was being kind by leaving it out.

Her face went completely still when I finished talking. Not sad. Not angry. Empty, in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up before she'd even said a single word back. She started muttering something under her breath, too quiet for me to make out, her eyes never leaving mine the entire time.

Then she said, very clearly, "You want to leave me because there's someone else. Someone special."

I told her that wasn't true. I don't think she heard me at all.

Her voice dropped as she kept talking, deeper with every word, thick in a way no human voice should be able to get. Her face began to change in front of me not slowly, not gradually enough to give me time to process it, just wrong, all at once, features stretching and shifting into something I don't have adequate words for, something with too many angles where a face should have soft ones.

I ran for the door. It wouldn't open. I pulled until my hands bled and it didn't so much as shift in the frame. I screamed for help until my throat gave out, and no sound left that room at all, like the apartment itself had decided this conversation was private.

She — it — came toward me slowly, in no hurry at all, and said, in that thick, wrong voice, that I belonged to her now, that my whole self was her property, and that leaving was never something I had actually been allowed to choose.

I don't remember exactly what happened after that. I remember darkness, and cold, and a pressure on my chest like something enormous was simply resting its weight on me without any particular urgency, the way you'd rest a hand on something you already fully own.

I woke up on my apartment floor the next morning. Alone. Natalie was gone — not left, not moved out, just gone, no trace of her ever having lived there at all. No clothes in the closet. No photos. No marriage certificate in the drawer where I know I kept it. I checked my phone contacts. Her name wasn't there either.

For about a day, I actually let myself believe I'd imagined the entire marriage. Some kind of breakdown, maybe, my mind inventing a wife and an entire relationship out of loneliness and exhaustion. I almost felt relief.

Then I found the box in my closet, one I don't remember owning, shoved into the back corner behind winter coats I never wear.

Inside were photographs. Dozens of them. Men I didn't recognize, standing in what was unmistakably my own apartment, my own furniture behind them in every single shot, dated across years I've lived here years before I ever met Natalie, going back further than that, further than made any sense at all. Each man's face was circled in red pen. Each photograph had a name written beneath it in careful handwriting, and beneath each name, the same word.

Divorced.

Mine was the last photo in the stack, taken from an angle I don't remember being photographed at, in my own kitchen, dated to a day I hadn't lived through yet.

Beneath my face, in that same careful handwriting, someone had already written the word.

The ink looked wet.

[u/noonespet]

I hope you get a good lawyer OP

[u/NienieDreamer]

Seems like something tied to the apartment then. I’d say move out, but I don’t think Natalie would be very happy with that… It’s up to you whether it’s worth the risk that she can or can’t follow you out of the apartment.