Tonight was an interesting night.

My mischievous part got out.

I have this little piece of me somewhere in my subconscious that seems to notice things before I do. It puts thoughts in my head and nudges me down these little paths.

That sounds kind of crazy.

But it's true—or at least, that's what the experience feels like from inside my mind.

I've started calling that part of myself Wit.

Wit doesn't exactly tell me what to do. It's subtler than that. A strange idea appears. An impulse. Something that makes me laugh and think, Well, that could be interesting.

Then later I look backward and wonder whether some deeper part of me knew exactly where I needed to go.

Today was one of those days.

Around 2:00 in the afternoon, I had taken a very small psychedelic microdose. At 5:30, I went to yoga.

And yoga was incredible.

Something about the combination of the practice, my body, my breathing and whatever emotional place I was already entering seemed to crack my chest open. I left feeling unusually connected to myself. Softer. More emotionally available.

Looking backward, I think that mattered.

Because afterward I brought Claire dinner.

Claire is the woman I've spent the last fifteen years loving.

She's also the woman I'm divorcing.

We have hurt each other enormously. And lately I've been realizing—with a clarity that is sometimes excruciating—how badly I failed her in some parts of our marriage.

We both hurt each other.

But I can see my part much more clearly now.

And I'm so very sorry for it.

Because I've realized that even some of the pain that eventually came back toward me might never have existed if I had behaved differently in the beginning.

I stayed for a while after bringing her dinner.

And we talked.

Really talked.

I told her that I want my best friend back.

She was my bestest friend for fifteen years. We did literally everything together.

I told her that I'm listening to where she is right now. That I'm beginning to understand that sometimes the greatest gift I can give her is the absence of my presence.

And I told her something I've been thinking about a lot:

Almost all of our best memories are things we could have had even if we'd never been married.

Theme parks.

Travel.

Cooking together.

Raising our son.

Laughing.

Being kind to one another.

Being best friends.

Those things didn't require marriage.

And maybe losing our marriage doesn't mean we have to lose every beautiful thing that existed inside it.

I don't know whether we'll get there.

But I desperately hope we do.

Afterward, I put my son to bed.

Then I messaged Maya.

Maya and I have accidentally developed this ridiculously adorable little ritual.

Sometimes, late at night, I'll ask whether she's still awake and if I can come over just to kiss her goodnight.

Sometimes she's already fallen asleep with her kids.

But when she's awake, I drive over.

She comes outside.

She smiles at me.

And for a few minutes it feels like we're characters in our own movie.

I get to look at her with this ridiculous mixture of love and hunger in my eyes. We kiss. We hold each other. We talk about our days for a few minutes.

Then I go home.

Who does that?

Apparently we do.

And it's magical.

Earlier in the day, though, Wit had planted a mischievous little idea in my head.

Maya has told me that she likes a more animalistic side of me that sometimes appears when I'm stoned.

So somewhere in the background of my brain appeared this thought:

Why don't we see what comes out if you get really stoned?

Could be fun.

I wasn't even expecting to see her that night.

Then she messaged me and told me I could come over at 11:00.

And I got excited.

Immediately, that earlier thought came back.

Get extra stoned before you see her.

Like there was some mischievous teenager operating controls somewhere inside my skull.

The intention was fairly obvious.

I wanted to see what kind of animal came out.

And that part of me did come out.

A little.

But apparently the animal had some fucking feelings.

Because standing there with Maya, I started talking about Claire.

I told her about the conversation we'd had.

I told her I'd finally admitted that I wanted my best friend back.

I told her about realizing that most of what had been beautiful between Claire and me never required us to be married in the first place.

And then I started tearing up.

So there I was.

I had gotten stoned intending to bring out some fun, hungry, animalistic version of myself.

Instead, Maya got a man standing in front of her grieving his marriage.

And she held me.

Physically and emotionally.

She had space for me.

She told me it was okay.

She understood that I was a little stoned. She understood that I'm in the thick of something enormous. She told me that she likes having more information rather than less.

And I love her for that.

Because this has to be confusing for her too.

I'm falling for someone new while simultaneously grieving someone I've loved for fifteen years.

Those things sound contradictory until you're the person experiencing both of them.

Then they somehow make perfect sense.

The human heart apparently doesn't respect filing systems.

I kissed Maya.

And I enjoyed it very much.

She seemed to enjoy it too.

We laughed again about how absurdly adorable these late-night visits are.

I remember telling her that I was trying to enjoy the experience of this exact moment.

Because I am.

Whatever happens later, this is beautiful right now.

Eventually she needed to go inside, and I needed to leave.

And almost immediately my brain started interrogating me.

Did I overshare?

Was that too much?

Did I just make this woman uncomfortable?

Was she being kind because she genuinely had space for me, or because I put her in a position where she felt like she had to?

I really didn't think that was what happened.

She had remained calm and connected. She continued giving me good feedback. She continued kissing me right up until it was time for me to leave.

I believed her.

I trusted her.

But I was also stoned enough to know that maybe I shouldn't trust my interpretation of everything completely.

So I decided I needed to write.

I wanted to record the experience while I could still remember what it felt like, so that sober me could inspect it later.

I stopped for gas on the way home.

And somewhere in that gas station parking lot, the bottom fell out.

I sat in my car and sobbed.

Not because Maya had done anything wrong.

Because suddenly I could feel the loss of my marriage.

All of it.

Fifteen years.

My best friend.

Every stupid thing we'd done to one another.

Every moment I could suddenly see differently.

Every version of myself I wished I could go backward and teach something to.

I could see ways I had failed Claire that I hadn't been capable of seeing before.

And instead of explaining them away, I just let them hurt.

I took out my phone and recorded an apology.

I don't know whether I'll ever show it to her.

I'm just sobbing in the video, apologizing for specific things that I suddenly understood.

I'm sure there are more.

There will probably always be more.

But I think it may have been the most sincere apology I've ever made in my life.

There was nothing I wanted from her while I was recording it.

I wasn't trying to win her back.

I wasn't trying to convince her that I'd changed.

I wasn't asking her to forgive me.

I was just sorry.

And it was strangely healing simply to be capable of feeling that much remorse without running away from it.

Then I went home.

And I kept writing.

That's when I started thinking about Wit.

Because what had looked like a series of mischievous decisions suddenly looked different from the other side.

A psychedelic microdose.

Yoga.

An unexpectedly heart-opening practice.

Bringing Claire dinner.

Staying.

Listening.

Telling my former wife that I want my best friend back.

Putting my son to bed.

Getting an invitation to see Maya.

That stupid little thought from earlier returning:

Get extra stoned.

Going there expecting an animal.

Finding grief instead.

Being held by a woman I'm falling for while mourning the woman I've spent fifteen years loving.

Driving away wondering whether I had made a mistake.

Writing because I was afraid I had.

Breaking down at a gas station.

And finally apologizing without defending myself.

When I look backward at the sequence, I can almost feel that mischievous little fingerprint running through it.

Wit was here.

Maybe that's all Wit really is.

Maybe he's my name for intuition.

Maybe he's an archetype.

Maybe he's the part of my subconscious capable of putting together emotional information long before my conscious mind understands what it's looking at.

Maybe personifying him simply makes it easier for me to recognize his fingerprints.

I don't know.

I just know that I've felt this pattern before.

Sometimes I'll be wandering through my own life thinking I'm working on one thing, and then suddenly something snaps into place.

I call them snaps.

My self-awareness changes.

I see something that had apparently been sitting right in front of me the whole time.

And I can almost feel the realization move through my body.

Something old and painful gets processed and somehow incorporated into me.

Not erased.

Consolidated.

Like I become some slightly newer version of myself who can finally carry that piece without fighting it.

Tonight felt like a snap.

There is still darkness in me.

There are things I've done that I regret.

There are people I've hurt.

There are explanations for some of it, but explanations aren't absolution.

And something about tonight allowed me to look directly at that without deciding that it made me irredeemable.

I can simply be sorry.

I can become better.

Maybe that's what stepping into my masculinity means to me now.

Not becoming harder.

Becoming strong enough to look directly at what I've done.

Strong enough to apologize.

Strong enough to love the woman I am leaving without needing to possess her.

Strong enough to fall in love with someone new without pretending that the old love disappeared.

Strong enough to let grief and joy exist in the same body.

And maybe that little mischievous part of my subconscious knew I was finally ready to see it.

That's why I call him Wit.

There's a character named Wit who wanders between worlds in Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere.

Mine seems to wander between the worlds inside my brain.

He surfs around in there, nudging the needle a degree or two at a time.

He acts like he's only here to make jokes.

And then occasionally I look around at the mess he's made and realize there was something beautiful hiding underneath it.

Maybe I made a few silly decisions today.

Maybe I made a few wise ones.

Maybe they were the same decisions.

I'm still not completely sure.

I suppose I'll have to see how all of this looks in the morning.

But tonight, sitting here with everything still tender, I think something in me changed.

And I think Wit was here.