The Paper Trail

I have never been much of a newspaper reader. The headlines maybe but never the stories. The one thing I have always been able to stomach are the vital statistics. Around the time I got married years ago I started looking at the marriage licenses every single day. I would pour over them finding names that I recognized and ages so close to mine. I would imagine how their wedding would be like mine. I would want them to be in as much in love as me. I found myself wondering about their story.Years later after my own wedding had passed and we began to plan for a family I flipped the page to the birth statistics. I saw names I knew often and eventually my own three times.That was a time of lots of laughter and tears...mine and the babies. It was a whirlwind. It seemed to go slowly but when I look back now it passed in a moment. Sometimes I wish I could have read those baby announcements a little longer.

But you have to go forward. I flipped quickly through the next section. But as fast as I went I still saw names I knew in the divorce section. I wondered about the stories behind those names too. Why some marriages make it and others just don't. What happens to those families after the papers are signed.

The last section is still foreign to me. I know I will have to turn the page eventually and read their final story. I know I will start to recognize names as time goes on. I don't want to identify with them. I don't want to recognize names and read those stories but I know I will have to. Some day.