Soulmates by Jessica Grose

guy is such a phony. He told everyone his name was Nikolai and that he was descended from some of America’s real proletariat but Beth told me his real name is Nick Sampson and he grew up in La Jolla.”
    I sighed. “You don’t have to be so judgmental. He was perfectly nice.”
    â€œOoooookay,” Dana said, drawing the word out in the way she did to signal that the conversation was over.
    Instead of responding to Dana, I started practicing the deep cleansing breaths my Lama taught me to utilize during times of emotional stress. I tried to clear my mind of bad thoughts toward the outside world and focused on the sound of my own body.
    â€œWhat are you doing? Trying to fall asleep standing up?” Dana asked sharply. My eyes must have closed without my noticing it.
    â€œNothing. I think we should go home.”
    â€œNo, I want to stay,” Dana said.
    Part of me wanted to stay to make sure she got home okay. I didn’t want my drunk wife wandering the streets of far Brooklyn by herself. But I wasn’t in the mood to fight with her that night. I knew that the longer I stayed at the party, the greater chance there was that we’d get into some dumb argument. She was in no mood to compromise; she almost never was, but even less so when she was drinking.
    My New Year’s resolution, made just an hour before, was to leave behind the petty squabbles that had started ticking upin frequency. The year of the pig would be a new epoch for the Powells. Instead of insisting that Dana return home with me, I let her be. “Okay. I’m going to head out. I’ll miss you in bed when I am falling asleep.”
    At first Dana scowled. But then her face brightened a little. “That’s sweet,” she said. Then she stood up to kiss me good night. Her kiss had more tenderness in it than most of her kisses had the year before. As cranky as she seemed, at the time, I took it as a good omen.
    DAILY AFFIRMATION : “Omens are a language, it’s the alphabet we develop to speak to the world’s soul, or the universe’s, or God’s, whatever name you want to give it.”
    â€”Paulo Coelho
    I’d been thinking a lot about omens at this point. I never talked to Dana about this—I knew she would snort derisively about it if I did—but I checked our astrological charts every day and compared them. She’s a Taurus, but her moon is in Cancer, which means that she is both highly sensitive and excessively stubborn. I’m a Libra, and my moon is in Leo. I’m sensitive, too, but more malleable. I tried to look at our horoscopes to figure out which events in our marriage had been fated, and which ones we could control.
    One of my coworkers had been instrumental in encouraging me to look more deeply into our lives and figure out how I could make positive changes. I worked the third shift at an ad agency doing copyediting. The agency was so big and there were so many pages of copy touting the benefits of the latest miracleweight-loss supplements and deliciously chemical energy drinks that they needed copy editors working around the clock to keep up with the volume.
    I started this job in early 2006. I had been a bartender when Dana and I first moved to New York after college so Dana could go to a fancy law school. I was supposed to be making money at night so I could work on my playwriting during the day. I wrote a couple of short, semi-autobiographical plays that were produced in small theaters downtown. All my plays took place in Montana and involved a dead mother and a distant dad.
    After three years I’d hit a wall, both with the writing and the tending bar. I realized I was just spewing the same small, sad story over and over again. And serving endless Jack Daniel’s shots to depressed old guys who were avoiding their wives was sucking my soul. Dana was just finishing law school and since she would be making enough money to support both of us, she