Everyone's a Gymnast.

Relationships the second time around are harder. People don't talk about that. They talk about how it's easier because you've learned so much from the first time around.

What they don't talk about is that being respectful of your old relationship, and fully present in your new one, means that you don't get to just keep going the way you were. The private jokes and secret language you develop with a person...when they're not *your* person anymore it seems to me that it's not right, somehow, to share those jokes and that language. Some of it, sure, but you don't get to share it all. And then there's the fact that in sharing those things with your new partner, you're not developing new private jokes with them, not creating a secret language that belongs just to you and your new partner. And that's unfair, too.

So you have to work harder to keep the balance. And nobody tells you about that.

And then there's the guilt. The guilt over what happened, the guilt that the person I have become could have handled my marriage better, the guilt that who I was didn't really give the best of who I could be. And new guilt, too, that every minute I spend with my head in the past is a minute that I'm not really in the present.

It's about balance, all of it. Some days it's an easy enough beam to walk, others I slice my feet open on the finely honed edge of my own shame.

But it's the only path from here to there.