Divorce is brutal. It has a way of stripping you down to your sharpest edges. The pain alone can tempt you to become someone you don’t recognize—to sink into the heat of anger, to let vitriol be the only language you speak. Some days, it would feel so good to hand myself over to the rage completely. To just let myself burn.

But in the middle of all those flames, a memory will spring out of nowhere, and with it a deluge of countless moments that defined us and our relationship for over a decade: years of laughter, of growing and building a life together, of loving each other with the kind of devotion you read about in novels. For more than a decade, we were soulmates. I was the love of his life, and he was mine.

Now I live in the gray space between grief and gratitude. I can hold our beautiful memories in one hand while, in the other, holding the truth—that I deserved better in these past few years, after everything shifted. Before that, he loved me more fiercely than many husbands ever love their wives, and I count myself lucky to have been loved that way for so long. And still, I mourn the way it ended, sharp and shattering.

I can love him, and still let go. I can break, and rebuild, a thousand times over and come back stronger every single time. There’s steal in this heart, baby.

Over a decade of us: