Polska, it hurts.

“I’m not coming to Poland.”

“What!?!” I said. “OK. Why not?”

“I just don’t want to.”

“Why not?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I just, I don’t want to come,” he said.

“All of sudden? What changed? Why not?” I asked again.

“I’m unhappy,” he said. “I think we’re growing apart. I’m confused.”

“Ok, so you don’t want to come to Poland, but what are you saying?” I asked again.

“This isn’t working.”

“What? This marriage? Us? Are you saying you want a divorce?”

And then there was silence.

Please say this isn’t happening right now.

It shouldn’t have been a total shock. We’d been struggling for months. For years. For nine, to be exact. Ours was never an “easy” relationship. We were both big feelers, big egos, big everything. It was, as they say, a shit storm. A shit storm of love? Crazy Love? It was always intense. The love. The hate. The silence. The noise. All of it.

But this? Now? I could actually feel my heart breaking. I don’t know that I’d ever really felt that before. It was a sharp pain, sort of like a stab wound. Then it was pressure. Lots of pressure. From blood loss?

You will be ok. This isn’t really happening. This isn’t really happening.

But it was. My husband, the man I’d loved for nine years, and still do, was now telling me he didn’t want to be with me anymore. He was divorcing me. Over the phone. It was done. His Facebook relationship status and phone records said it all.

“We fight all the time, Denise,” he begged.

But I wasn’t willing to listen. Fighting is what couples do. They fight. That is what I knew. They fight to stay together. They do anything to stay together. That is all I could think. And now he was surrendering. Putting our marriage to rest just like that. And I stood next to our grave, as he was ready with his shovel full of dirt, and I continued to yank on the lifeless body, begging for one last breath, like one of the mothers you see in news footage from Iraq – leaning over her baby's body, trying to rock them to sleep. And they are already asleep.

Patrick was supposed to come to Poland. Just before I left we were talking about all the fun cold cuts we’d eat together. All the weird pictures we’d take. All the strange, falling down places we’d run in and out of like madmen together. It would make us better again. We’d be whole again. Happy again. No more fighting. This was going to be the way it should. That would do it. That would fix it.

I’d been trying to fix our marriage since I’d gotten sober. I thought – I’ll get sober and it’ll get better. But though I got better, we didn’t. The fights continued. He was not going to budge. He was not going to change how I thought he should. But I still couldn’t accept it. I figured, I’ll just wait him out. And then I figured, we’ll go to Europe, and that will make it all better.

But this was just my dream, I now realize. This was the dream I’d been living off of for more than seven years of our relationship. The dream of the life we’d have together but simply would never come. When we were young, we did this together. Then, when he started touring and our lives changed and I was trying to figure myself out in all the wrong ways, it disappeared. But I was sure that we’d get it back. I got better. I found myself. I knew I still wanted it. And I was waiting for him to give it to me. But now, he was finally telling me that he couldn’t.

Now, he wanted a divorce. Over the phone. He, in Akron. Me, somewhere else.

I wanted to kill him. Then I wanted to fly back to Akron and put him in a cage until he changed his mind and then I could let him out, give him a biscuit, and pat him on the head, and wait until he did it again. Then I entered my sort of insanity. I checked our phone messages, emails, and social networking accounts, trying to figure out why he’d made such a sudden decision. I refused to believe that we’d been working toward this moment. Instead, I blamed it on a girl he met. Some girl in New York.

“It feels good when I talk to her,” he said.

And my heart broke a little more. Because I wanted to make him feel good. But I couldn’t. I had to finally admit that we no longer could make each other feel good. And that he could no longer really make me feel good either. I was always trying to let him, but it never quite worked.

So, now, here I am. I’ve been in Poland for a week exactly. And I’m finding myself at the beginning of a divorce that I don’t want but want to fight even less. I want to believe that if we just wait a little longer, it will get better. But he assures me it won’t. So I’ll try to give in. I’ll at least do this right. I’ll stop screaming at him to be more supportive. To change. To not drink so much. To be more honest with me. To get in shape. To get healthy. To forgive me for all the bad things I did over the years. To be someone he’s not. Because that’s not fair. And I can’t do that to either one of us anymore.

I know it will be ok. I see that every time I walk through this city – a city that has survived so much pain. A city where my grandma survived so much pain. And I know that I will survive. I will suck this city dry of its strength and I will feel whole again with each walk through a new park, each visit to the old Ghetto wall, each cup of coffee, and each day I trudge forward and force myself to sit down and make my book a reality.

And I won’t stop writing. And I won’t stop videotaping. I’ll keep going. Because I have to.