Still, I fantasized about the tumbleweed playing songs for our kids on his guitar, telling them the story of the night we first met. Even my daydreams hit a wall pretty soon, though. I cringed to think of him hating the tedium of meeting a child’s needs, over and over again; cringed to think of him longing for the road again, the beds of strangers.

At twenty-two, I would have been desperate to make him want all the things he’d never wanted. By thirty-five, I’d learned you can’t make anyone want anything. That was what I told my therapist, anyway. In my heart, I said, Maybe you can? Let me try.

For the first time in years, I was writing fiction—scenes with an artist father and his estranged teenage daughter. She was staying at his run-down house in the Texas desert. When she opened the fridge, I pictured the empty fridge in my father’s apartment. A prior version of me might have been entirely swallowed by the girl’s perspective, her resentment and desires, but now I found myself curious about both characters: the daughter’s discomfort at waking up in a bachelor’s house—quietly opening all the cupboards, not sure if there was anything to eat for breakfast—and her father’s anxious uncertainty. How much did he need to entertain her? Did he need to buy her tampons?

To lose time, to lose myself, to lose the tight orbit of my own looping thoughts, just for an afternoon—these were the things I’d once wanted from booze. But it was always writing that offered the purest version of this surrender.

That summer I was ravenous for the world—for stoop chats on hot nights, and endless seltzer at my kitchen table, next to the open window, listening to the anonymous soap operas of strangers on the sidewalks below. I’d never felt more seduced by the city, more grateful to it. I was determined to treat the divorce not as life paused, but as life happening. Every feeling was a fucking miracle. I wanted to believe that maternal love could be bolstered by everything else you longed for—friends, work, sex, the world—rather than measured by your willingness to leave these longings unanswered.

Wednesdays and Sundays started to feel less like proof I wasn’t fully a mother and more like freedom. Maybe it was okay to want what I wanted: long nights with friends, or solitude for work, the stillness of a Thursday morning spent drinking coffee at my kitchen table, chewing on pen caps and listening to strangers’ voices rising from the café tables below, where twenty-somethings drank cortados and read Nietzsche before their restaurant shifts. Someone said, “It didn’t end when colonialism ended.” Someone replied, “Who said colonialism ended?”

He believed self-transformation was impossible, while I found it addictive. Choose your heartbreak: stuck in prison, or always on the run.

When she asked how I was doing, I said something vague but not entirely dishonest. “Oh, maybe a little overwhelmed.”

She looked me straight in the eye—I’ll never forget the clarity of her gaze, its tender X-ray—and, without my mentioning anything about a man, told me that she used to be with men who brought chaos into her life.

She said, “I had to leave those men behind, in order to do my work.”

The only thing the ex-philosopher and my ex-husband had in common was that both of them invited me to live in the story of our relationship rather than its daily texture. Saving the widower from his grief. Saving the ex-philosopher from the vacuum of his finance life.

This was one of the lessons I kept learning: the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it; between the story of motherhood and the texture of living it, the story of addiction and the texture of living it, the story of empathy and the texture of living it.

In my firehouse days, a friend told me that surviving divorce isn’t about getting what you want, because you won’t. It’s about making the best life you can, with what you get.