Girl you got those joint custodial blues

Two mornings later you're sitting outside on the deck stairs, poking your spoon listlessly at the dregs of a bowl of the weird dinosaur egg oatmeal Scott brought for you since you're a notorious lover of children's novelty foods, the stupider the better. You didn't use a fork to trawl for the newborn dinos as the box recommended, so instead of dinosaurs when you get to the bottom you just have a few rather sad-looking puddles of melted red and yellow goo. It's a pretty perfect symbol for how this vacation feels so far. Both of them insisted they wanted to stay for your sake, for some value of "your sake," anyway.

The mutually fastidious civility they're showing each other somehow actually manages to feel worse than them bickering and passively-aggressively dunking on each other. Maybe it feels like that because by not pulling the plug on this whole thing day one, you feel responsible for both of them being here and all of you having a highly shitty time.

The last two nights were—yeah, you're alternating days with them, because that's how solidly the divorce metaphor holds up—well, they were pretty fucking awful because all three of you are at this point faking that you're not miserable to be here.

You should just give it up. It's so, so stupid that you're spending these ridiculous one-on-one evenings like this, where you can't manage to actually enjoy yourself because you also can't manage to shake off the feeling one of you is late and you're just killing time waiting for him. So much for partying the hell down. You're not even sure if you can get through another evening like this.

Then again, you're absolutely dreading the drive home. Probably the biggest reason you haven't asked to go back yet is that every time you think about enduring that awful car ride—only to get home and then things are just, over, between the three of you—a physically painful knot of sadness flares up beneath your breastbone.

You're starting to think though that maybe the sad breakup chestache hurts a little less than spending the full two weeks letting your friendship linger and die painfully on hospice.

You scrape the remains of your aborted-dinosaur-egg breakfast into the bushes, then stand up to take your bowl back in the kitchen.