The guy and I left our Windsor Terrace brownstone in a rental car early on a Saturday for a wedding in Connecticut. About a quarter of the way into the hour-ish drive, he asked, “How do you think people see our marriage?” Or something to that effect as the decades have shaped this question into a mirage-like memory. Also, at that point the thing I remember most is thebuzz&ring inside my body and between my ears. I didn’t fully understand the question and probably asked something like “What do you mean?” The long&the short of it, where he was going with the whole sideways intro into the conversation was: I’ve discovered I’m not into women.

Naturally, this both terrified and explained a lot, especially when it came to our nonexistent intimacy. There was a flash of So it’s not me that lit up like neon, then fitzed out when the next thought of Sh&t, change is coming buzzed in. I did. not. want. any. change. at. all. Ever. But as I vibrated with that, he was still talking, telling me how over the last many months, he’d discovered, while online in his basement office late into the night, that his sexuality was oriented in a completely different direction than what our relationship pointed toward. That he’d been truly agonizing over it for a long, long time. How it felt so good to finally say it out loud.

That was about the time we pulled into the church parking lot and I stumbled out of the car and spent the next few hours watching two friends say sweet things to each other about forever and love, then pretended to care about joy, the chicken option for dinner, the cake smashing scene for dessert, and dancing at the reception. I cared about the wine drinking.

On the way home, I had landed in some sort of bargaining stage and told him we should do an open marriage setup. We could stay in the house exactly as we were, but create the downstairs as a separate apartment and he could have all the privacy he’d want to do whatever. And, me too, I guessed. Although at that point, my altered reality was not craving sexual adventure. Instead, I’d found that the safety I’d felt in our relationship resembled more a bunker where I felt protected from ever having to explore my desires because, well, mostly because I felt they would just get me into trouble.

This open marriage idea was not a thing the guy was interested in. He wanted freedom. To move into his own place, perhaps even a relocation to the West Coast.

Here’s the thing: When one person has been ruminating on a new life without you knowing it, they’ve been working things out, making solo plans, seeing into their own future, and started the emotional process of moving on. But the other person—in this case, me—has had no onramp. It’s just a literal Boom, here it is. This is what’s happening. Catch up. I’d been tra-la-laing around not paying attention to the clues: the manuscript he’d written and had asked me to read, which basically spelled out my disappearance and his sexual confusion through the eyes of made-up characters. A story I’d copyedited for him because I’d thought it was fiction. I also hadn’t given many deep thoughts as to why we weren’t intimate since it had been years and at that point the numbness was wrapped around me thick-comforter-in-winter style. He wasn’t riding off on his motorcycle into the night anymore, but I now knew that this was because he was taking all his journeys via the internets in his basement office.

So, no, he wasn’t going to negotiate with me about staying and calling us open. Within a month he’d found a new apartment across town. He still wanted to run together, hang out, see movies. I transferred my pain into being proud of him for being brave enough to say what he needed (oy). I decided I would keep the house because I just couldn’t handle the thought of packing and moving … I didn’t want to. I had begun a full-time job at Condé Nast and had some idea that I could afford to stay. My tax-money person dissuaded me of that idea very quickly. Plus, at some point, if I wanted to start dating and hanging out with people again, this neighborhood was not at all silly with singletons or even walkable restaurants, plus taking the F train into deep Brooklyn late at night and walking the multiple blocks to the house did not sound fun or safe. At heart I’m a homebody, so the house would have just become my hermit cave.

We put the house on the market in the fall. He moved to SoCal at that same time. I began looking for apartments I could buy in the city. Winter came, and no offers. I had looked at some places in Upper Manhattan that I could afford and was now crawling out of my skin to make the move happen. That was a dark (&snowy) winter. I did the house maintenance of shoveling and salting while my neighbors asked politely how I was. As winter became spring, I was reminded of how those neighbors who bookended me lived and seemingly thrived: in the backyard on one side, the house of multiple generations with kids, grandkids, pets, weekly barbecues with a million relatives, laughter, wine coolers and beer; in the backyard on the other side, a young couple with two young ones, a minivan, a vegetable garden, and Martha Stewart picnic table area where hip friends came to have weekend brunch with mimosas and interesting wine varietals under their fairy lights. (Yes, I peeked over the fence.) I would set out the chaise longue in the back, stare at the neglected cages that had been set up to grow tomatoes, and flip through all my magazines while applying 65+ sunscreen and napping. A drone flyover would have been captioned “One of these things is not like the others.”

In my heart, I knew I didn’t want to lead either of the lives sandwiching me, yet the thought of figuring out the life I did want to live made me extremely tired. Finally, as summer began to blaze, someone made an offer on the house. It included keeping the tenant, which was a relief given the original man had moved out and a really lovely woman who worked for the International Rescue Committee had moved in, and although she was rarely there given her job travels, the place seemed to fit her. Finally, in June of 2008, I was able to make an offer on a one-bedroom in Washington Heights with great big windows facing Fort Tryon park. It was my startover launch pad: a thrilling, terrifying, life-renewing space where I would begin to process the last decade and attempt to begin the next and beyond.