When I first met DearSweetDave on the September day all those years ago I had recently extracted myself from another relationship that had lasted for more than 15 years. The end of that relationship, a relationship and friendship that I honestly believed would last forever, came quite swiftly. He also drove off with nearly all my things in the back of his truck to Colorado.
For the first few years of my relationship with DearSweetDave, there was an ongoing joke about how I used to have X or Y, but it now lived in Colorado. It could be as simple as a certain CD or as complicated as an entire set of copper pots and pans, but with the exception of Clyde and clothes that were only fit for a girl to wear, pretty much everything dashed off to Colorado never to be seen again.
I found myself wishing yesterday as I looked at our very fine china, the china we chose so carefully together when we were making plans to be husband and wife, when we were registering for wedding gifts, when we were crafting what our future just might be, that DearSweetDave would just grab it all and drive away in the middle of the night and leave me standing there in an empty house with just Buddha and Stella.
I'm not sure if the pain of that would be less or more than the pain I am experiencing now, because, honestly, I'm living this pain now and the pain from my last relationship is over ten years old and of course pain has a way of healing and easing over time. 
There's the matter of my wedding dress. A dress that, like the fine china, was chosen with quiet and deliberate certainty. I was only going to wear the White Dress once. I had a White Dress Syndrome, actually, and because I had been certain, before meeting DearSweetDave and truly trusting him with my delicate heart that I was never going to be married at all, never going to wear a White Dress, never going to have a wedding, the White Dress held for me quite a lot of significance. Perhaps more than it should have held. But there you have it.
And now, there it hangs. In my closet. And I'm not quite sure what to do with it. It actually is a little too big at the moment thanks to this Trauma Trim Diet I've been on for the last month. It is an exquisite dress. I chose that dress above all others because it truly represented me. And yes, I know, it's just a Big White Dress. But it was therapy for me. It eased all my Big White Dress Syndrome fears and I knew, on that day especially, that I was truly a Bride and, more importantly, that I was absolutely a Wife.
Today, I am neither a wife nor a bride. I am about to be divorced. And single. And do I really want to be some ghost of Mrs. Haversham dragging her old wedding dress around because she simply can not let go of what was supposed to be, the dashed dreams, the hopes of what might have been?
Do I want to have that fine china there with rotting wedding cake reminding me each day that DearSweetDave has chosen someone else? That he loves someone other than me? That I am not his only true love? That the dress, the china, the champagne flutes were all just props in our drama while DearSweetDave discovered that marriage to me only caused him deep and unfathomable unhappiness?
I loved him. Truly, madly, deeply. With all that I was and all that I had, but it just wasn't enough. A wedding dress and fine china will only remind me of that. I think I need to leave those behind, as well.
