Severance

 

 After I left the farm, I did not leave it behind.

 There was no clean break. No new life that replaced the old one. There were only seasons, and the seasons made the decision for me.

 Winters belonged to my grandparent, summers belonged to the farm.

 There was no discussion about it. No alternatives presented. This was simply how things were done. Children did not choose where they lived; they adapted to where they were sent.

 In winter, I missed my mother.

 Not abstractly — not as an idea — but physically. I missed the sound of her moving through rooms. The way she folded laundry. The particular weight of her attention when she sat beside me without speaking. At my grandparents’ house, care was steady and visible, but it was not hers.

 I carried her absence like a low fever.

 In summer, the ache reversed.

 The farm returned me to a life that still felt unfinished. Orren was there. The house had not softened. My brothers had grown in my absence, reshaped by routines I had not shared. I belonged and did not belong at the same time.

 At night, I lay awake missing my grandparents with the same intensity I had missed my mother only months before. Their quiet kitchen. My grandmother’s certainty. The sense that nothing bad would happen while they were awake.

 I learned then that longing is not exclusive. You can miss two places at once, yet belong to neither fully.

The Rhythm of Return

Each return to the farm required recalibration.

I arrived taller, quieter, carrying habits that did not translate well. I had learned to speak without interruption, to finish sentences without fear. The stammer softened in winter and threatened to return in summer, as if my body remembered where it had learned to fracture.

Mother watched me closely when I came back.

She touched my hair more than necessary. Asked small questions. Studied my face when she thought I wasn’t looking. There was love there - real, immediate - and also something else, harder to name.

Regret, perhaps.

Relief that someone else had stepped in.

Fear that I might not stay.

She never said any of it out loud.

The boys treated me like a visitor at first. They circled me, tested me, measured how much authority I still carried. The youngest was the quickest to close the distance. The burned brother took longer, watching from the edges, cautious with his trust.

Orren behaved as if nothing had changed.

That, too, was information.

Learning to Split

By necessity, I became two versions of myself.

One version knew how to exist quietly, how to anticipate moods, how to move through the farm without attracting attention. That version learned quickly each summer and shed the habits again in autumn.

The other version lived with my grandparents. He spoke more freely. He slept deeply. He forgot to listen for footsteps.

Neither version was false, both were incomplete.

Switching between them took energy I did not know how to measure at the time. I only knew that returning anywhere came with a cost. Leaving always hurt someone — often me.

I stopped expecting wholeness, adaptation felt safer.

What Choice Looks Like When There Is None

 People like to talk about childhood choices.

 They ask why you stayed, why you went back, why you didn’t refuse.

 But refusal requires an option to refuse into.

There was no alternative summer. No other place prepared to take me. No conversation about permanence or preference. There was only logistics, habit, and the quiet assumption that children absorb whatever they are given.

So I went., each time.

And each time, I learned something new about loss - not the dramatic kind, but the ordinary, repetitive kind that teaches you to expect absence as a feature of love.

Love That Pulls in Opposite Directions

I loved my mother fiercely.

I loved my grandparents deeply.

Those loves did not compete — but they did not align either. They pulled me in opposite directions, stretched me thin, taught me early that affection can divide as easily as it binds.

In winter, I dreamed of the farm — of open space, of my brothers’ voices, of my mother’s presence like a gravity I could not escape even at a distance.

In summer, I counted days until autumn — until the quiet certainty of my grandparents’ house returned, until I could unclench again.

I never told any of them this.

Each side believed it held all of me.

I let them.

What That Did to Time

 Time stopped feeling linear.

 Life became cyclical instead — arrivals and departures, packing and unpacking, re-learning rules I already knew. I grew older without feeling older. Experience accumulated, but resolution did not.

 Adulthood, when it eventually arrived, felt less like a beginning than a release from motion.

 For years, I thought something was wrong with me for never feeling settled.

 Now I understand:

 I was trained to move.

Lilith

 

I met Lilith before I divorced Sylvian.

When Lilith learned I had been married, it shocked her. I hadn't mentioned it in our early courtship.

I wasn’t trying to deceive her even if I hadn't presented the whole truth when we met. The marriage had already collapsed inward at that point; the paperwork was just lagging behind the truth. 

I understood her reaction, there are facts that remain facts regardless of intent.

When she then learned I was still legally married, it shocked her even more.

She chose to stay. That decision mattered more than any explanation I offered.

Time is a series of sliding doors, and this was one of them.

Our children are the result of that decision.

Stockholm

We lived in Stockholm when we married, in the summer of 2004. Even so, we chose to marry in Reykjavik, where our family and roots were.

The city environment suited me. It had structure without hostility, distance without coldness. Streets that behaved predictably. Public spaces that didn’t demand performance. I could exist there without constantly scanning for threat or misalignment.

Lilith moved through the city differently than I did.

She was direct where I was cautious. Expressive where I was measured. She didn’t circle topics the way I had learned to. She named things quickly — feelings, expectations, frustrations — and waited for a response.

At first, this felt like safety, then it felt like exposure.

A Different Contract

Our relationship was originally based on a misunderstanding, she thought I was an inconsiderate prick writing chauvinistic posts on some dating site and my outward persona can very easily be interpreted as someone like that.

I know I've been an asshole in the past, I fear I will probably be an asshole sometime in the future.
In the meantime, I try very hard not to be one.

She'd recently gotten out of an abusive relationship with exactly such a character, and even if she wasn't consciously looking for a replacement it feels like her subconscious was looking for the familiar patterns she was used to.

Our marriage did not begin with urgency, that alone distinguished it from the first.

There was no shared debt masquerading as devotion. No crisis to manage together. No business to rescue. What we shared instead was something quieter and, at times, more difficult: mutual presence without a task.

Lilith didn’t need me to save her. That unsettled me.

I didn’t yet know how much of my identity had been built around usefulness, around stepping in when something faltered. With her, there was nothing to fix. She wanted companionship, not containment.

I had to learn how to be there without doing.

On the surface, she came from the ideal perfect happy family, where communication was key and everyone respected each other's feelings.

It wasn't until much later that I learned how different the reality behind the scenes was.

Violence has many shapes and forms, only a handful of those being physical.

I still remember one of the first serious conversations I had with her father; "In this family, you don't divorce". It felt genuine at the time.

After My Sister

We married only months after my sister died.

Grief hadn’t resolved itself by then; it had simply gone underground. I carried it with me into the marriage, unannounced but active. Lilith noticed, of course. She noticed everything.

She didn’t push, she also didn’t pretend it wasn’t there. This was new to me.

In my family, grief had been managed through silence or logistics. Lilith treated it as something that could be spoken about without needing immediate resolution. She asked questions I didn’t always know how to answer as the words required weren't a part of my emotional dictionary.

Sometimes I resented that, sometimes I was grateful.

Truth Without Rescue 

What distinguished my marriage to Lilith most clearly was this: she did not allow me to confuse honesty with withdrawal.

When I went quiet, she didn’t assume it meant depth. When I stepped back, she didn’t read it as virtue. She insisted — gently but persistently — that being present meant staying engaged even when nothing was breaking.

That you fight for what you care about, even if it means having painful conversations when silence would be the easier choice.

This was harder than crisis, crisis had rules. Stability required improvisation of a different kind.

I learned, slowly, that love did not always arrive with urgency attached. That someone could want me without needing me to absorb their fear. That intimacy didn’t have to be earned through endurance.

I was not good at this at first.

What Changed, What Didn’t

I didn’t stop being vigilant. That kind of habit doesn’t dissolve easily. But I began to notice it in myself - the way I anticipated conflict that never came, the way I prepared explanations that weren’t required.

Lilith would watch me sometimes, then say, simply, “You don’t have to do that.”

It took me years to understand what that was.

Marriage as Mirror

If my first marriage had revealed how quickly I confused care with obligation, my second showed me something else: how easily I mistook restraint for depth.

Lilith wanted access. Not control, not dominance.

Access.

She wanted to know what I was thinking while I was thinking it, not after it had been filtered for safety. This was not a skill I had learned early. It didn’t come naturally. It had to be practiced.

I failed at this frequently, but I never gave up.

That mattered.