Favorite Disney Princess, I guess.

[anklin]

My parents marriage fell apart in the last years of my father’s life. Fifty some years of being together, crumbling away because of old age and stress and a million problems I didn’t understand, because of tiny family tragedies. I was divorced twice by then, but it somehow felt different. A problem of my generation, or myself. The faults in my own marriages were due to character defect or impatience or an inability to stand down rather than some broader statement on love itself. Marriage was hard work, I knew, I had heard, and maybe I just hadn’t put in enough effort. I was damaged but not beyond hope and somewhere amongst alimony payments and two bands stuffed in the bottom of a sock drawer there was a vague notion that generations before managed to make it work so maybe it could. My old man wouldn’t go to the counseling I was convinced could glue them back together. I begged, a grown man reduced to teenage uncertainty because I had spent half my last two trips home listening to both of them vent to me separately about the little cracks that were starting to appear. They didn’t talk to each other, they snipped at each other. Things became unforgivable and if they were thirty years younger or a little less Catholic they wouldn’t have lasted as long as they did. They never divorced. He died, in a way that would take up five more pages on a different day, and she was sad the way people are when anything ends, her tears mostly bitter, her heart shattered years before, the same way his was. If they had lasted on their own free will rather than convention alone, maybe I’d still believe but Love, big Love, vanished like Santa Claus on those sticky summer nights when I was finally determined grown enough to see behind the curtain. I’d rather die alone than buckle under a fairy tale turned to dust.