I Changed My Ex-Husband’s Name in My Phone

The elephant can read.

There’s a big elephant in my life and I just did something I should have done a long time ago. I updated the contact information for my ex-husband on my phone. I changed the name. I changed the photo too—used a pretty one of her in Oaxaca, smiling in full Frida Kahlo gear on her birthday.

I changed it to her chosen name, the one that still catches in my throat sometimes. I liked the old name and the old photo, but that person no longer exists.

She is Ava Quintana now. Ava like Eve, the first woman.

But she wasn’t shaped from a rib. She has always existed. Since the babysitters dressed her as a little girl. Since she hid in her mother’s perfumed closet between the flowing gowns, hiding from prison fists and cigarette burns. It breaks my heart for her.

But my heart is broken too, and I am no longer the woman I was with him.

The girl giddy with love. The skinny girl and the pretty boy with the Dali tattoo on his slender torso, who dressed like Elvis, who promised he would always hold her fears. Like that night in the desert at Anza-Borrego after we crawled through a canyon teeming with bats and scorpions.

When we reached the ridge at the top, I panicked beneath the sheer immensity of the stars. I felt myself dissolving into the Milky Way and he held me until I came back to earth.

Should I have known?

She thinks so.

She says I always loved beautiful androgynous men anyway. David Bowie. Syd Barrett. David Gilmour. Elvis with the pouty mouth. She says I should have known when we moved to Munich after college and she started wearing long black skirts and thick eyeliner. I should have known when Victoria’s Secret panties and wigs began accumulating in drawers.

M. was the one to find them.

“What’s this, Mama?”

“Papa’s Halloween costume,” I said.

I didn’t know.

Or maybe I refused to know.

Besides, we were busy living.

We took long road trips to Roswell, Bryce Canyon, the Carlsbad Caverns. We disappeared into Las Vegas with our glamorous little posse of beautiful wrecks, drunk on Moët and debauchery.

We wandered the jungles of the Yucatán while our guide led us to pyramids that hadn’t yet been excavated. We met a Mayan shaman. We drank from his cup while he chanted. But he couldn’t save us.

We had our own rituals.

Every morning he made me a cappuccino in my favorite tiny turquoise cup. We called it a baby coffee. We watched reruns of Twin Peaks in bed while eating pie straight from the tin. We grew older and softer together. Had a kid. Bought a house.

Las Vegas Wedding Day

We lived a full life as husband and wife.

Until we didn’t.

Until everything cracked so completely apart that I am only now trying to gather the pieces and determine which ones still belong to me.

Is it even OK to tell this story? Who grants me permission for something like this? Who greenlights this public excavation of a marriage that no longer exists but still haunts me?

At some point, though, it has to be told.

The main problem is that this elephant can read. So can everyone adjacent to the fallout. My parents. My family. And what will they think? How will they judge? But why am I still protecting everyone from the reality that rearranged my entire life?

For years I believed this was her story alone to tell. But lately I’ve begun realizing it belongs to me too. I stayed silent while she stepped fully into her truth—renamed, affirmed, celebrated. Meanwhile I receded. Burned down so gradually I almost missed it happening.

But I refuse to disappear simply because she reappeared as someone else.

I do not know what it means yet to have done this.

Only that I did it.

Her name sits in my phone like it was always meant to be there.

And I am still learning how to grieve something that is still very much alive.

After writing this, I may need one.