This is Where I Leave You

by Jonathan Tropper

your soon-to-be ex-wife. Ex-wife in waiting. Ex-wife elect. The self-help books and websites haven’t come up with a proper title for spouses living in the purgatory that exists before the courts have officially ratified your personal tragedy.

He turned around, wiping his face on his arm, and, with no preamble, kicked me in the balls. If you have no balls, or have some but have somehow made it through life thus far without ever having injured them, then you’ve missed out on one of the most exquisitely nuanced variations of agony known to man. It is the piano of pain, melody, harmony, bass, and percussion all in the same instrument. First there’s nothing. A surprising amount of nothing actually. No pain at all, just white noise and the shock of having been hit there, in your softest of places. And because the pain has yet to arrive, you dare to hope that it won’t come at all, that the impact was less direct than you first thought. And then it comes, like thunder on the heels of lightning, at first just a faint rumble, a low, steady hum of discomfort. If it were a musical note, it would be one of those bottom bass notes they use in horror films to create an ominous sense of dread, of dark, fanged things hiding, poised to spring. It’s a loaded hum, because you know a note that low only has one direction to go. And as you feel the dull, pulsating pain emanating from the center of your being, from your core, you think to yourself, I can handle this, this is nothing, I can kick this pain’s ass, and that’s the exact instant that you find yourself suddenly on your knees, doubled over and gasping, with no memory at all of how you got there. And now the pain is everywhere—in your groin, your gut, your kidneys, the tightly...

Friendship in the suburbs is wife-driven, and my friends were essentially those husbands of Jen’s friends that I could most tolerate.

Then he looks up at me and smiles widely, like he might have smiled at me when I was a little boy, like he never did once I was older, a warm and loving smile, uncomplicated by my own encroaching manhood,

being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.”