Speaking of death on the road: Molly's first ex-husband

Tuesday 7/21/26

Something that I think about. It'll pass through my mind. Maybe I should say it reoccurs to me, because I don't need to give it additional thought, as I now know it to be true. But that suggests one ought not to think about thinks once they're known to be true, and that doesn't make sense, either. I guess it matters on the nature of the thing. One encounters truths in a great work of art, one thinks about the truths and should until the end. Perhaps beyond, for all we know. But a truth like this one here isn't one to dwell on because no good comes of it.

When Molly's first ex-husband learned she was getting married again, and so soon after, he called her his "crazy ex-wife." I remember hearing about that. It found its way to her and thus it made its way to me.

And I thought, you know, it was probably him. She told me all these stories and it was only later that I realized they were all lies. He was right. For instance, she'd tell me that this ex-husband had plans to murder her. She'd sleep with a rolling pin in her bed, she told me, to fend him off in case he came for her. There was nothing to support any of this. But she'd bring it up often.

One time she said that he had tampered with her car and loosened the wheel so that it would pop off while she was driving, thus killing her. There you are, and you think, because of the side you're on--that's a lot of it--that, okay, these things must be true. I was fed many such things, and I came to learn that this guy was just someone who thought she was, well, something closer to what she was, which I learned later.

I actually think about him now. I'm sure he had no idea she was saying what she did about him to me. So the wheel would pop right off. She probably went around and said the same types of things about me and worse that also had no basis in the truth.

What happened to me with this person, and what I did as a result, as first a person left to deal with that being done to them, what it meant to my life, the trauma I have which hasn't diminished at all in all this time, and what I did as a person as a result, the ways in which I was altered and also the ways in which I grew, will be the subject of their own account, a memoir, though I'm no fan of that term. It sounds...breezy and topical to me. But a book. If and when I'm not in this situation, because then it makes sense.

But I'll just be doing some random thing at maybe some strange hour and that summation of his will flash into my brain. He definitely got there before I did.