Ex-husband
By: Loukia Borrell
The High Window
June 2022
I always thought he was out there, though we
were not in touch recently. He seemed to be well.
I used Google to check on him now and then.
He had retired from the police department and was
teaching people how to ride motorcycles.
Later, I saw his mom died and the next time I checked,
he was dead, too. I saw his obituary and realized
I didn’t really know him anymore. I called a woman
who knew us when we were married; cancer, she said,
and I remembered all those cigarettes and
a bit of a wheeze in his breathing, even then,
when he was young, and his hair was still blonde.
I wore a white ballgown and he was in a tux.
Off we went and made a go of it, touring Bermuda
on a moped during our honeymoon, during which
there was no sex and the hotel manager told me
he couldn’t understand why my groom sat poolside
late at night, inhaling cigarettes instead of me.
We continued through the early cracks and crevices,
saw the Florida Panhandle, drove on Daytona Beach and
explored the British Virgin Islands in a jeep.
Then, the deeper chasms, when I would watch
Thelma & Louise on VHS and cheer them on,
feeling liberated from married life, from him.
Two years after the wedding, tired of spending
the worst nights at a Hilton, I flew home with one bag,
a couple of months before O.J.’s jury said he didn’t do it.
I only saw my ex once after we split
and when I did, returning with my father
and brother to get my belongings, there
were no lingering glances or outstretched hands.
After his death, I remembered he had a port-wine stain
on his chest, but I forgot which side it was on.
I went long periods and didn’t think of him at all,
and now, wondered if it was strange to remember
a man I once loved, frozen, enclosed in a snow globe,
and forever unreachable, as if we were married again.
