... | Divorced Angler Memories Of A Big Catch -2024-

I cast again. The lure plinks softly. And I realize: that big catch was never the fish. It was the we in the fight. The hand on my back. The shared gasp when the net scooped the air.

The boat rocks gently now, a familiar rhythm I once shared with someone else. Today, the passenger seat holds only a faded life jacket and a Thermos of coffee gone cold. It’s 2024, and I’m fishing alone again—not out of loneliness, but out of a quiet need to untangle the lines of memory.

“A big one,” I grunted, forearm burning.

The sun breaks over the pines. I take a breath, steady as a rod tip. And I cast one more time—not for the past, but for whatever big, beautiful, impossible thing might still be swimming down there, waiting to surprise a divorced angler who finally learned that letting go is not the same as losing. Divorced Angler Memories of a Big Catch -2024- ...

We released it, of course. Watched it slip back into the murk. That was the point: not possession, but the moment.

This morning, I feel a tug. Not on the line—in the chest. The kind that says: You were loved once. Fully. In a small boat on a quiet lake. That catch belongs to both of us, even if we’ll never speak of it again.

Now, in 2024, the divorce is a year old. The reasons are a tangle of quiet cruelties and unmet needs—no single villain, just two people who forgot how to navigate shallows together. The lake has other boats, other couples laughing. I don’t envy them. I just remember. I cast again

Then the rod bent.

It was late September, three years before the papers were signed. The lake was glass, reflecting a sky the color of old pearls. She was with me then, reading a paperback she’d never finish, occasionally looking up to ask, “Anything yet?”

Not the polite tug of a perch or the lazy pull of a bass. This was a deep, ancient surrender of the line—a slow, heavy lean into the depths. I remember her dropping the book. The splash startled a heron from the reeds. It was the we in the fight

--- For anyone who has released a great love back into the deep.

For forty minutes, we fought. The fish didn’t jump like a marlin in a Hemingway story. It bulled deep, a muskie or a monstrous pike—a ghost with fins. She took the net, standing at the gunwale, her hand on my back. Not coaching, just there . That touch. Steady. Warm.

Divorced Angler: Memories of a Big Catch – 2024

Some memories are like hooks—you can’t swallow them, and you can’t throw them back. You just carry the scar.

When it finally surfaced—a torpedo of olive and gold, jaws lined with needles—we both laughed like kids. Forty-two inches. Maybe more. I held it up, water streaming down my wrists, and she kissed my cheek. “You did it,” she said.