17. Maya
Maya
"The Divorce Question"
Priya asks it at lunch on a Tuesday, three weeks after the phone call, setting it down between us with the careful precision of a lawyer who has been holding a document she needs you to sign.
"Are you filing?"
I look at my soup. "I made an appointment with a lawyer."
"Okay." She waits.
"I went. Last Wednesday. Her name was Sandra Park, very professional, very thorough, went through all my options with complete clarity." I pause. "Community property, shared assets, what the timeline looks like if we go to mediation versus litigation."
"And?"
"And I left with a lot of information and no decision."
Priya puts her spoon down. "Tell me what's stopping you."
"I don't know that anything is stopping me," I say.
"I think I'm just — I'm not ready to decide that this is over.
I don't know what that means. I don't know if it's grief or hope or just fear of the finality, or —" I stop.
"I've been waiting to feel certain about it one way or the other, and I don't feel certain. I just feel complicated."
"Complicated is allowed."
"I know." I look at her. "Part of it is — the last time I talked to him, on the phone, he didn't push. He didn't ask me what it meant or what I was deciding or whether I was coming back. He just said thank you for telling me. And then he let me go."
Priya is quiet for a moment. "And that changed something."
"It reminded me that he's not. He's not a bad person, Priya.
He's not someone who has done something that requires cutting off.
He's someone who was absent in a way that was — slow, and accumulative, and absolutely devastating over time.
And I need to know whether he understands that difference, and whether he can change it. And I can't know that from here."
"So what do you need?"
"I need to keep being myself," I say. "The self I'm becoming, the one I'm remembering how to be. And I need to see whether he can meet that person."
She picks up her spoon again. "That's a brave answer."
"Or a stupid one."
"Not mutually exclusive."
We eat. The soup is good. The afternoon light is doing something beautiful with the windows.
When I get back to my apartment that evening, I open the new sketchbook.
The pages are filling. Not with design work, not yet — with a personal project that has been taking shape over the past few weeks, in the early mornings before the studio and the late nights after.
A series of illustrated pages. Letters. Not the letters I'm writing to Daniel, not the letters I'm not sending, but letters to someone else.
Dear Maya at twenty-two, I write, at the top of a fresh page.
And then I draw her. The version of me who was in that apartment on the near north side with two other designers, who had a client list and strong opinions about typography and too many coffee cups on her desk.
I draw her from memory, and she looks like me, and she looks like someone I'm glad to be moving back toward.
I fill three pages. Then another. Then I stay up too late and don't care even a little.
I am not filing. Not yet. I am also not going back — not to the life I left, not to the version of myself who lived in it. Whatever comes next has to be built on something more solid than nostalgia and convenience.
I am learning what I'm made of.
The sketchbook fills.
End of Part Two