I want to write about that properly, because it is the actual subject of this story and everything else is procedure.

For about two years after the divorce I could not decide whether the thing I felt was grief or relief, and it turns out that it is both, permanently, and that nobody tells you that.

I went through six years of treatment.

I wanted it.

It was not a performance and I was not, whatever anybody in that family decided, secretly withholding.

I sat in the parking structure in Newport Beach after the third failure and could not start the car for twenty minutes.