It’s 6 am and I’m in my study, tap-tapping away at my keyboard while E snores. I can’t sleep.

Twelve hours ago, I turned my phone on vibrate as I was getting ready to go to dinner with a cute coworker I have been sort of dating for the last two weeks. More on him some other time. On my way home, I discovered I’d missed a text from Mel, followed ten minutes later by a call from her husband.

“Call me asap,” she’d written. Mel does not overuse ASAP. I phoned her immediately – she said “I’ll call you right back” and disappeared. Something sounded wrong, very wrong. I waited ten minutes and called her husband instead.

“Ben?” There’s silence on the other end of the line but I know he’s picked up. “Ben, what is it, what’s going on?”

“Melissa’s out.”

“Out? Out how? What?”

“She’s leaving me. She told me she wants out and she doesn’t love me anymore.” His voice was tiny, I could hardly hear him, I must have misunderstood because that did not add up at all. I swerved into the parking lot of the nearest gas station.

“Say that again. Please tell me I heard you wrong.”

He says it again. “She says she’s been thinking about this for six months.”

“No no no, she can’t have been–” I choke on the words. “Ben, she never said, she couldn’t have–”

“She says she didn’t tell anyone.”

I pull back onto the road, forcing words out. “Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Where is she?”

“On her way to work.”

“Do you need me to come over?”

“Tim’s here. My brother is on his way.”

God, how I love the two of them, Ben and Melissa. They’re my family. Their families are my family, their parents and sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews. They live half a block away. They grill out every weekend during the summer. They have an 18-month old baby. They love each other, they have the marriage Tim and I always said we envied. They just had their five year anniversary. They’ve been together for ten years.

And she left him. I keep thinking I misunderstood.

By the time I got home, I was in hysterics. Mel hadn’t called back. I needed to talk to someone, and I don’t know how to explain it except to say that I needed to talk to someone who knows me and who knows my relationship with them. Tim, of course, was with Ben, but in all honesty the first person who sprang to mind was E.

E called me over the weekend, I hadn’t gotten around to posting that. We talked the other day for about forty-five minutes, a conversation full of apologies (his) and acceptances (mine). If we hadn’t had that conversation I don’t think I could have called him – I don’t think I would have called anybody. But I did call him, and he called a cab to come over.

While I was waiting for him, Mel called me back. We spoke for about twenty minutes and it began to sink in that she didn’t just storm out. They didn’t have a fight and a huff. I’d heard Ben right, she knew exactly what she was doing and it was real. Not “I’m thinking of leaving him” or “I don’t know how much more I can take,” it was simply “I’m done.”

“You’re really on your way to work like this?” I asked. She’s a cop. She can’t be even slightly off for a minute.

“Never let them see you sweat,” she said tiredly. “I have to.”

“I know. Call me at seven when your shift ends. I’ll take the day off, I’ll be with you, we’ll talk or listen or anything. Call me as soon as you’re off.”

She started to cry. “I will.”

“I love you, sweetie.”

“I love you too, B.”

I had almost regained my composure when E showed up. I hadn’t seen him for over three months and I just fell against his chest, sobbing when he walked through the door. He held me for a long time. We sat out on the back porch and talked for hours about Ben and Melissa, about other friends and our families and catching up, and about us. It was not an ideal night to have that conversation but it’s another one that just spilled out. Divorce is a topic that has always made him cynical – he’d always say things like how he doesn’t want to get married or have kids because everyone’s marriages fall apart, blah blah.

Tonight he threw cynicism to the wind and said he loves me, never stopped, lied because he was scared, and wants another chance. He said he’ll do anything for me to take him back, that he wants us together for real, to make it work, to raise a family – holy shit, did he say that? Ladies and gentlemen, he did. On the night when the relationship I thought was my aim in life is crumbling around the people I care about, E says the things I never thought I’d hear. I used to hold Ben and Mel up to him as an example of how people could get married and balance time together and time on their own, how they could have a baby and still have a sex life and a social life as a couple. I’d say look, just because you’ve got friends who’ve had screwed-up marriages doesn’t mean every marriage is like that – see, Ben and Melissa make their life together work, they do it right.

What the hell did I know, anyway? What did any of us know? They’re my best friends. I had no clue, Ben had no clue – and although I know it’s been on Melissa’s mind and heart for months now, I know it’s something she never expected either.

The marriage I wanted and never had is falling apart. And E wants to get back together and build toward that relationship he says he’s finally strong enough to have. He wants what he said he didn’t want. Melissa wants what she never thought she’d want. Ben wants what he can’t have.

My alarm just went off to wake me from the sleep I didn’t get to start the work day I won’t have. Am I even oriented enough to think about what I want right now?