People ask me how I’m doing, and I answer, “I’m getting divorced,” because it sums up the mix of emotions and situations fairly well enough, although far less adequately than most people deserve in answer. I admit, it’s a lame response, an inadequate answer, a facile and abbreviated avoidance of the provision of a true reply, which would typically be a simplistic, “I’m good.”

I seem to have this natural tendency to make things sound worse than they really are, and that bothers me, because it is a quality which I abhor, and only barely tolerate, in others. I am, actually, doing quite well, but because the bulk of my time is spent in isolation, I find myself reaching out to people with whom I’d normally share very little, and at a depth which I’ve never wanted to share before. And all because my life is in a state of turmoil, which after roughly forty years of varying degrees of change, upheaval, and unrest, one might presume I could handle with a bit more facility.

I mostly do so; I just have this tendency to start along a path, from which I often, and quickly, have to pull back.

In some ways, “until again” is an attempt to forestall that tendency. I write in the hopes that once having written whatever it is I’m feeling at any given moment, I won’t have this intrinsic, insipid need to have it come dribbling from my lips in what is fast becoming my typical, self-deprecating fashion. Because I hate it about myself. I am, like most people, the most intolerant of what I view to be my own shortcomings, after all.

“until again,” is also an allusion to how I sign my personal letters to those with whom I am close. It is a “dawnnism” for “until we meet again” which I’ve been using since I was in my early twenties. I dropped the “we meet” from it because the sentiment had nothing to do with whether or not we might meet again in physical spaces. And of all the catchy blog names I’ve come up with for myself and others over time, it ultimately seemed the most apropos. For indeed, I greet you, and will continue to welcome you here, until (we fail to meet in the physical world) again.

So, I’m going through a divorce, but that’s just the very beginning of what I do not doubt will be a long and involved journey of the rediscovery of myself, as well as the redefinition of myself as an individual, a friend, and a father. For I am many things besides a pending divorcee, but all those things are changing along with me, and the person whom I was, and whom at least a few people across time have loved and admired, will never be again.