So, I’ve decided: my life is not stranger than fiction. My life is precisely like a real life, filled with joy, sadness, large and small risks, successful experiments, failed ventures, good people, weird and bad people, health, illness, disappointments, met and unmet expectations, and lots and lots of loss.

The differences I spoke of in my last entry turned out to be, as I had thought, irrefutably irreconcilable. There was simply going to be no way for the two of us to pursue a life path together with the clash in values that had emerged.

In an incredibly brief meeting yesterday, we parted ways peacefully and amicably. It took less than ten minutes at a local coffee shop to exchange keys and trade a few personal items from car to car.

While there are residual feelings of sadness and loss, feelings that I imagine will hang around for some time, at this point those negative emotions are offset by a profound sense of relief.

I tried. She tried. In the end, it simply didn’t work.