A year into the global pandemic, G, my husband, and I went to Sun Valley, Idaho, to end our marriage. It was a place neither of us had ever visited either as a couple or with our two daughters. It was neutral territory with no nostalgia.

The plane from Los Angeles, sparsely filled with masked passengers and crew, jolted and bumped as we came in for a landing. I hated turbulence it was a reminder that I had willingly placed myself in a precarious situation. Instinctively I reached for G, my hand hovering over his before I pulled it back. We may have looked like a couple who had been married for 25 years, and legally we were, but we had been living apart for longer than we were together.

Fourteen years earlier, I had asked G to leave our family home. At the time, I had a basic schematic of what divorce should look like: someone moves out, lawyers are called, everything is divided, children get shuffled from house to house, end of story.

Our dissolution did not quite turn out that way.

G and I met when we were 18 years old, living on the same floor of our freshman dorm. He was from Long Island; I was from the Midwest by way of Utah. G was well liked, and we would all pile into his room to hang out. He held space like a magician, captivating us with his sense of humor and lightning quick mind.

We hooked up on a drunken night and started dating. I had only had one boyfriend before him, and this felt different less fumbling and more electric. We shared a love of reading that was intoxicating. I had never met anyone who devoured 20th century American literature like I did.

I remember the moment we fell in love. I flew to New York City for the first time to visit G and his family. I had seen the city in movies and on television, but nothing prepared me for experiencing it in person: there was the top of the Chrysler Building from Its A Hard Knock Life in Annie, the stark towers of the World Trade Center, Lady Liberty holding her torch. Gs parents were larger than life his mother with her weekly blonde bouffant beauty parlor appointments and his father with his office high up in Rockefeller Center. Over dinners we laughed at their outrageous stories, like the time G was a baby and his mother folded up the stroller and put it in the trunk of her car, forgetting he was still strapped in. It all felt straight out of a sitcom or a movie.

One day, G took me to lunch in the town of Oyster Bay. We had been writing letters all summer, swapping book recommendations, and there we were sharing a bottle of wine and talking over one another, trading insights about Hemingways Nick Adams and Steinbecks Ethan Allen Hawley. We were captivated by those men writing iconic stories about life, death and the American dream stories of moral compromises and the loss of innocence.

Sitting in the late summer light of Gatsbys Gold Coast, flushed with wine and flattered by my charming boyfriend grinning at me from across the table, I felt alive. With college coming to an end, I had been struggling with an escalating inner gloom, fueled by panic over the impracticality of my Latin American History Major. G was studying to be a doctor, and it came easy to him. I wanted to do something that helped people; I also wanted to be a mom. There, with the sound of the sea lapping at the shores of grand mansions, I wrote myself into a story that transcended my small-town origins and stifled my simmering depression.

We moved in together after college and two years later, G and I were married.