Rebar

In the middle of the night last night, I woke up, not exactly panicking, but a bit disturbed that I hadn’t updated this blog yesterday, and would have to either skip it again today, or come up with something to write about right then, and be prepared to just spit it out quickly in the morning, when it occurred to me that I could dig through my stuff and find something I’d written previously and post that. Something older, that hopefully you would either never have read, or would have forgotten by now.

I decided to post a story I wrote shortly after my divorce about the evening that my ex- came over to sign divorce papers and sell a car to a neighbor, and we ended up in this weird scene where the guy we were selling the car to tried to get us to bend rebar by placing an end on each of our necks, and then walking towards each other.

The rebar was 8 feet long, and my soon to be ex had done this with said neighbor a few days before, and had showed me the piece of steel, bent into a horseshoe shape, which I found really disturbing.

I try to tell stories here that aren’t so much about me, because as we’ve established, no one does care what anyone else had for lunch, but rather, I try to use the stuff that happens in my daily life to remind you of what you care about in your own. I’m not sure if it’s working, but I hope so.

This particular story, I thought, was good for that, because it was about the weird decision points we have in our lives. In that particular instance, the neighbor set us up with one end of the rebar on my soon to be ex-husband’s neck, and one on mine; the metal rested on the delicate soft delicate part of the neck that, in my opinion, is meant to be kissed, not bend steel. The man commanded us to walk towards each other and focus.

He didn’t describe what we were to focus on, but all I could think about is how awkward it would be for our children, home alone for a short bit while we did this car transaction, to have as a legacy for their whole lives that they were orphans because their parents had skewered themselves on a piece of rebar on purpose. Anything we had done with our lives previously would be eclipsed by this bizarre death, so I chickened out and said I really wasn’t that interested in bending the rebar.

The two men, my ex and the neighbor, looked disappointed, and it occurred to me that we were all disappointed for various reasons, and the disappointment went way deeper than just this little magic trick that I wouldn’t participate in, but I also think they were a little relieved as well, because it was my fault, not their own, that we didn’t bend the rebar, and in a weird way, it was a little gift I had to offer, that everyone could blame me for all of their disappointment, if that makes any sense at all.

So I was all set to just type that story up and post it, but I looked in all of the places where writing might be found – various file cabinets and folders and notebooks, and I can’t find a bit of anything I’ve written prior to owning this particular computer in June. Arrgh, is all I have to say about that.