Divorce is a very personal trauma, it is not without a great deal of thought that i publish this, because as i said earlier, the map is not the territory, therefore what i write bares little relationship to what happened, it can only be a proximity of what happened to me and the process i underwent for purposes of explaining to you, the reader.

To look back at this point in my life now, causes no pain or trauma, no sorrow or confusion at all.
After being married for a number of years, feeling happy, secure and safe, part of a family experience that we all desire at heart, it ended very suddenly when my wife left after accusing me of having an affair.
This was compounded by many other issues that complicated the situation for me, however my wife had accused me of something i had not done, and no amount of sincerity would change this belief. Other things were said, and actions made that made it impossible for me to ever contemplate being in a relationship with her again.
(One of which was the fact that her fortune teller or physcic had read in her cards that week the insane proposition i had already had two affairs with other women. To her this was irrefutable proof; 'it's in the cards so it must be true' and one has to question the invested faith in a pack of cards)
So in the heat of the moment i made the best decision i could, which was to confess to the phantom affair and take full responsibility. This was a disaster, sending me hurdling into areas of the mind i never knew existed.
Like i said she left and took my son and I lost my home. This happened in the space of a few days and I found myself in a small-unfurnished apartment in Glebe, living alone.
The emotional problems were confounded by feelings of identity confusion, psychosomatic illness that manifested in epilepsy, narcolepsy and a various other newborn neurosis. The worst being I felt that a kind of cancer was eating me, it was black and grew inside me like a skeleton attached to my own. It was fibrous and growing. At one point it had overtaken my body and was now a massive black abyss that lived inside me. I was its host and it would feed on sadness. I began to drift through life carrying this Void entity that had invaded my body.
The material world, (the world of domestic appliances and family cars and jobs and television pop stars, families and friends) all it’s facets and facades seem to fade out and superimposed over the top was a new world, a strange place of hurt, fear and tears, pain and suffering, crisis and trauma.
There was meaning in shadows, meaning in colours, soft pastels and creams seemed pervasive, the lonely tragic figures one throws tokens and coins to in the train station and bus shelters now seemed to offer sanctuary in the depths of their eyes, the coded rambling’s and nonsense they spoke made more sense than the meetings and conversations about mortgages repayments and tennis club memberships from my past life.
I was sinking further away, drifting into a sub life, the murky grey depths. I knew I could fight, I knew I should seek help, I knew that this was the path to madness and beyond, but I had surrendered to it, I had let the tide engulf me, the oceans swallow me up and I was drowning in loss, moving further away from, rational thoughts, common sense and logic, finding some sort of sense in the chaos.
During this period I stopped fighting the insanity, clinging to what i knew, everything was slipping away so fast, surviving now meant letting go of everything I had known and trusting that there was some purpose to what was happening to me. It was an unconcious stratagy, but also it was part of a design that i felt was inevitable.
However I could not see this perspective at all, I had no friends, no family to talk to and no way to cope with the loss, other than loose everything completely, including the last remnants of sanity which i did, with a disturbing enthusiasm. There were no drugs or alchol involved, just a velocity towards utter destruction of ego. I have to mention that this is an essential part of any spiritual process, the ego must be shattered, it can be done in a numer of ways but none so effective as severe shock or tramua. I think travel, certain drugs and certain meditational disiplines can get there but they are long processes and involve an intellectual route, thus the ego is not destroyed, just deconstructed.
Things came to a head when I found myself desperately hungry and alone in the darkness of an empty apartment. It was devoid of furniture and any thing except a bed, a clothes rack and clothes and a photo of my son.
I was overcome by a primal sense of hunger and searched for some cash, as I had no available income or funds. I eventually found $4 in my coat pockets and ventured out in the pouring rain. Immediately I was soaking wet, drenched and lost in the neon glow of the Vietnamese Restaurant across the road. I ran across, bare foot, I had forgotten my shoes.
Slamming my $4 down I asked, ‘What can I get for $4?’
The man behind the counter took my money and said, ‘Boiled Rice.’
I nodded and waited like a grateful and compliant refugee, a sad dog looking for a free meal or a bone in the winter.
Grabbing the bag I raced back, up the steps to the apartment. I could feel the warmth of the bag, the heat transferring its way along my fingers, I clutched that bag so tightly my fingertips burnt.
In the darkness I stood in my trench- coat, saturated and tragic, like a love letter coming apart in the rain. I sat on the floor and opened the tub of boiled rice, smothering my face in the steam as it rose from the food. I was starving and it was intoxicating me like a narcotic.
It was then that I realised I had nothing to eat the rice with, no plastic complementary spoon, no cutlery in my kitchen, no chopsticks. I searched the kitchen, it was empty save for an old plastic tea strainer that some one had left laying in the drawer on its own. I scooped a tea strainer full of rice and pushed the gauze upwards into my mouth.
This was it. The moment at my life thus far had come to pathetic, tragic and actually quite funny. I laughed and laughed. At that point life split down to roads, the one where I cried and let the Abyss swallow me or the one that I found myself on, the one where I laugh back at the universe and the cosmic joke it played on me.