when this isn’t a bad dream. when you can’t wake up to the sun shining through your windows.

I know this is ugly, but can I just say that driving around with divorce papers sitting in the seat right next to me–the seat that should be filled with my loved one, making the contrast that much more startling–is just unbelievable?

It’s enough to make me curse.

The other day I had a friend over. He wanted to look at some papers on my desk but these weren’t just any papers: they were the papers I was using to meticulously hide my divorce papers. And so when he nonchalantly reached to grab them, I jumped.

I jumped like I was a starving child and he was trying to take my last piece of bread. It was weird and out of character and he looked at me like it was weird and out of character, but neither of us said a word.

The truth is I was embarrassed.

I didn’t want him to see what I was hiding, but an even greater truth is that the entire world is going to be seeing what I’ve been hiding.

Because it’s real.

I sang at a funeral a few weeks ago and ran into someone I haven’t seen in a few years. The conversation was casual and eventually got to Drew as she asked me how he’s doing. Trying to give nothing away, I apparently failed miserably because right after I said, He’s…okay…with no fewer or no more words than just those two, she abruptly asked, Are you guys still together?

And it took my breath away. But not in the way that most ballads mean, not even close.

Nor did I know how to recover.

So I said the party line that has since become old. We’re going through a hard time. He’s made bad choices and we’re separated.

And then she said that was too bad. She said it like I told her my old Aunt who last I checked was 108 had just died peacefully in her sleep. She said it with distant compassion.Then she mentioned someone else we both knew, a mutual friend, who had just gotten a divorce too.

She said too and the importance of that word was not lost on me.

I hadn’t even mentioned divorce and now a friend of ours had just gotten one too.

I wasn’t ready for that conversation. And I sure as heck wasn’t ready for commentary on the fact that I was a gaping wound who had managed to put on a dress and sing Ave Maria that morning. I wasn’t ready to tell people that I was bleeding from the jugular and then be offered a band-aid and a pat on the back.

You better believe that my response to the question, How’s Drew? got a lot better when I was asked the same thing at the reception for the funeral. I actually may have overcompensated, to be honest, because as soon as I heard the words I answered loudly. Cheerfully. Like there’s nothing I’d rather be talking about then how Drew is doing.

Oh, he’s great!!!!! I said.

But then when this woman asked me where he’s working, my oscar winning performance lost the oscar. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where he was working. Not even the city he worked in.

As I was deliberating, taking too much time to answer such a normal question, my friend Christian jumped in like a champ.

He’s doing the sleep tech thing in Dover, he said with a smile.

Yes! I said. In Dover! He’s working in Dover!!!! And I am pretty sure I sounded like I was one stop from the loony bin.

Well, maybe I am, actually.

The thing is, I just don’t always know quite what to say. The truth is a start, but how much of the truth? And do I really want to get into it? All the time and everywhere?

No, I don’t.

Not at the gym. Not when someone I haven’t seen for years asks me how Drew’s doing, if we’re still in Newark. I’m on the bike and the last thing I want to be doing is communicating that I am going through a divorce, that what seemed like one of the couples who would definitely make it is now definitely not making it. That I am a cliche just like all the others. That I might as well have had a reality show called The Newlyweds and then made a country album that flopped. And the fact that my name is also Jessica? Well, perfect.

So I don’t tell him.  And I don’t know, maybe that is wrong, but I don’t know how to do this at all, least of all perfectly.

And while the man at the bank today was fumbling through my divorce papers, trying to figure them out and then notarize them, he apologetically explained, I’ve never been married .

To which I said, Well, I’ve never been divorced.

Which is the truth.

And I have no idea whatsoever what I am doing.

And it sucks to be attaching stupid papers to your heartache; as if the facts of our marriage, the details of our intertwined lives could ever encompass who we’ve been and who we are now. And how trite that this thing that is negating us could give me a paper cut.

But God, this is real, and I will feel my way through the dark until somebody turns on the light.

I just hope that happens soon.