Once Around Again – Named from the Ashes

Once Around Again is a series named after an old inside joke between my brother and me, back before I knew what a glaring asshole he’d grow up to be. Like most inside jokes, it only made sense if you knew why it was funny at the time, but the phrase stuck. We used to say it whenever we were back at it again, whatever “it” happened to be: back on the road, hearing the same bullshit from the same person, backtracking down a street because our father refused to ask for directions. That’s the spirit behind this series: me revisiting posts I wrote a lifetime ago. I literally have sons older than some of these posts, lol.

Names have a way of triggering things. When I was in fourth grade, I had a best friend named Tara. We were bosom buddies, in the only way someone who was never allowed to visit her friends house could be. We were close when we were at school, and every school day spent in the classroom we would fill each other in on whatever happened the day before when we had gone home. I feel like at some point we may have exchanged phone numbers and called each other on a house phone, but somehow that doesn’t feel true. And one of the things we were eager to discuss with each other were the lives of two of our teachers that we were shipping. We were shipping before shipping was a thing.

Because one was our English teacher, and the other was the Phys Ed teacher, we didn’t want to refer to them by name while we were in school, so we gave them nicknames. And the nicknames weren’t that far fetched. They were literally Himself & Herself. Super creative, right? It got the job done. I’m pretty sure there was a toy/character back in the day called Herself the Elf, and that was where we got the idea. Not super creative I know, but it made it more plausible for us to be having a conversation about Herself the Elf during lunch, and leave no one the wiser. Brilliant.

Turns out we were hella on point about the lives of Himself & Herself. Our lunch time was the time when we would report to each other if we had seen them out in town, if we spotted them together at the Stop & Shop, or at the Pizza Hut restaurant on the weekend. Whichever spotting that was outside of the school grounds was of note. We were miniature PIs at 8 years old, and damn good at it. Initially, no one believed that there was anything happening between the two of them. For me and Tara, we were too astute to dismiss the signs. So we were not at all surprised when the following Spring at the end of our fourth grade year, Himself & Herself announced they were getting married.

Decades later, the compulsion to assign an alias to a recurring character is alive and well. It served the purpose of assigning another name, something other than his actual name, or something that would continue to attach his identity to mine. If he was the ex, he was the ex-husband. Whose, ex-husband? Mine. Too close. I didn’t want him to be my anything anymore. It was bad enough I had to contemplate that hew as out there roaming the earth free to live a life where he wasn’t broken or sorry for the pain and suffering he caused in mine. The name I called him in that moment would be his name going forth for the rest of time. SO it had to be memorable, fitting, and appropriate to use into perpetuity.

And I documented the process in this post from one month post-divorce in 2013. Fresh from escaping the fresh hell that was my old life in New Jersey, the ex, the memories, and the ashes of my marriage.

Thirteen years later, this naming rite was mighty successful. He has forever lived with his new name in my head. He was, and continues to be a horrible person. There are aspects of his personality, of who he is, that cannot be reconciled, even with time. Things he did and things he said after the divorce was final that are unforgivable. When his name was chosen, I chose wisely.

Looking back over the many years since the divorce, having the distance an alias creates, has taken away the attachment that the previous title may have maintained. There is an objectivity to speaking of someone who was previously so personal to me, with the remote detachment of a stranger. The name mr horrible has outlived the man in my life. I speak rarely with mr horrible in real life so I sometimes find it hard to say or think his actual name.