Blame Saturn Returns. Vick Does.

It didn’t seem right that after six years of marriage, not to mention the work I put into landing the guy in the first place, that it would boil down to something as simple as a coffee cup platitude. "You gotta do what you gotta do?" My pronouncement was meant to set off long looks and a dark night full quarters in the jukebox. No lonesome whippoorwill or low-whining midnight train? Guess not. Hell, it didn’t even look like a second beer was in order. Vick pushed a red plastic, paper-lined basket full of mottled yellow popcorn towards me, and I gnawed on a couple of foamy kernels. More disappointing was the lack of a Patsy Cline-and-Wild Turkey sobfest than the notion of becoming a 30-year-old divorcee. But damned if she wasn’t right.
“How?” I asked, too surprised at her forthrightness to be defensive, and relieved at her utter lack of judgement.
“Couple of things. First off, you’re in your Saturn returns.”
I had no freakin’ clue what she was talking about. “Oh, but of course. Saturn returns. I don’t know how I ever missed it in the first go-round, and now it’s back.”
“Being sarcastic is unattractive in a single woman.” She took a deliberate sip of her beer, looked straight ahead, placed the bottle squarely back on the cocktail napkin, and continued. “You’ll end up bitter, and no one will date you.”

About That First Marriage . . .

Lots of people are surprised to find out I was married once before. It's true, and it was when I was teething, I believe, so I had a lot of off-days during the marriage. Reflecting and writing about it has been a challenge, even though the whole thing ended fairly quietly. My very brief, very superficial take on why the first one didn't work:

Tacit and overt. There’s symmetry there, a yin yang quality in which the opposites do their flowy thing, the universe is balanced, and the Big Ohm is achieved. However, when yin’s notion of reckless abandon is trying the peach syrup at IHOP while yang is back home in the basement trying do-it-yourself taxidermy with roadkill, the dynamic is seriously out of whack. Yang will act out just to be a pill, yin will pull in to avoid the unwanted side effects. The curve is warped, and in our case, it was beginning to throw the entire circle off.