Yesterday I rode in my ex’s car for the first time since we split. It was a five-minute drive both ways, but it felt like five years. The purpose of the trip was to go to the bank so that he could take his name off our joint checking account. Our uncoupling has unfolded in stages like this, each more mundane than the next. This name gets taken off this account, this address gets changed, this document is signed with the illegible scribble of the pen.

When I got into the car, I noticed that he had a shiny new GPS. He revealed that the GPS was purchased for him by his new girlfriend. Staring at that GPS, I felt myself blown far off course. “Mommy-daddy, mommy-daddy,” chanted Sami happily from the back seat. He insisted on holding both of our hands as we walked to the bank. I felt sickened and sad and nostalgic as he skipped and jumped excitedly between our hands. We looked very much like a family, but it was a horrible lie.

On the way home, I couldn’t take my eyes off that GPS. I stared deeper and deeper into the small digital screen as my husband tried to talk to me about various topics. I can’t remember if I answered him. Then, as quickly as he arrived, he was gone, car, GPS, and all.

It has been difficult to come back into the present since then. But there have been moments.

Standing at the sink today, doing my dishes, I thought about that beautiful GPS sitting on my husband’s dashboard. I thought about the other woman he is loving right now, the one who gifted this piece of equipment to him. I wondered what plans they might have for Valentine’s Day. I felt that familiar, desperately-avoided punch in the solar plexus that comes when I remember the end of my marriage. Tears. Then, almost immediately, came the longing to connect with other men. To slap down the emotions and the aching, unbearable burn of the present. But I have come to understand that, whenever possible, I must bear it. I must redirect that longing for another to make me complete - to put all that energy into my spiritual practices instead.

Writing, like counting the breath, is a technique to stop running away. When I sit here, I flip the default “auto pilot” switch in my brain and put it into “manual.” I locate this being on the map, my ever-changing position in an ever-changing universe. I know that I can choose at any time to shift course. To stop driving along the same old circuitous path and to take a new path to a new destination.

Today, my marching orders are to live into wholeness. To remind myself that I am complete, here, this little dot in the great big world.