The Grand Prix is here in Montreal.  I only know this because downtown traffic is making me late for school...and I am a pedestrian.  And it's not just any traffic, but multimillion dollars worth of traffic.  Today alone, in the first five minutes outside my door I saw several Porsches, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris among many other shiny fancy cars with names I probably couldn't pronounce or doors I'd be able to figure out as they open upwards and not outwards, each worth more than my mortgages.  I guess this would be my third Grand Prix, marking my third summer in Montreal.  I don't know why I would consider the Grand Prix to be a marker of time.  I'm unusual that way.  And not just the Grand Prix, but pretty much any of Montreal's summer festivals-which are indeed many.  I think it's because the summer was when I was finally lucid to the facts of having left a marriage and an entire life very much different than the one which was unfolding.

That first summer was most indeed the most difficult.  I didn't stay in Montreal, I took all my courage, which was very little at that time and sent all the things Phil and I had moved up together with back to BC via Greyhound.  I followed with Air Canada.  I didn't have a plan; I didn't know where I was going to stay-Thank God for Laura.  I had sincere intentions on trying to make things work and fix things.  I was frightened though.  So frightened: A little bird with a broken wing stuck indoors not able to find the window she had flown in through, and even if she had, she was too beat-up to make the flight back through.  That was the time when our life seemed to emulate a badly written romance comedy.  I remember shaking my head in disbelief recounting how oddly  accurate those movies actually can be in their hair-pulling, frustrating, missed-timing sequences.  We had so many incidents of the "missed timing".  Those incidents where the hero or heroine misses the other by mere seconds, or poor communication creates misdirected tangents and emotional obstructions preventing even the smallest beginnings of reconciliation- 

I had my divorce papers notarized today.  I had to raise my right hand and swear an oath which was written down for me in a framed glass document.  I then watched as the lawyer stamped my papers.  It was all so official.  It was all so final.  I had expected to feel very sad.  But I wasn't.  I was in fact...exhilarated.  And not because I was happy to have an end to some sort of horrible bad marriage or horrible separation-what one usually hears about, but just an end.  An end period. An end to the wondering of all those missed timed words and actions, if they had been played differently or a minute sooner or later, what would have happened?  An end to wondering on hope, if one should have it or not have it, and if one were to have it, what are they to do with it? An end to wondering on effort, to make or not to make.  The thousand different endings I had written in my head, I don't think I ever comprehended a final divorce in any of them.  And yet mine is here.  All that's left is a stamp and envelope.  hmmm...I may not have cried during the stamping of the documents, but I'd be lying if I were to say I didn't have tears now.  But ends can be good, and sometimes needed.  Without an end, I would be making no new beginning.  My third Grand Prix would turn into five, and then seven, and I would still be here, another summer passed in Montreal, wondering and punishing myself for something which had indeed ended a long time ago.