Two Lanes Over

Today I found myself in one of the most uncomfortable places I’ve been in over twenty years…the bowling alley. Not just any bowling alley, but the one tied to some of the most complicated memories of my life. It was once owned by two people I considered my best friends. People I trusted. People I loved. One of them took complete advantage of me when I was in one of the most vulnerable places of my life. What he did wasn’t just betrayal, it was a crime.

Since then, I’ve avoided this place at all costs. I never stepped past the threshold of that door. I couldn’t. The only time I even came close was to exchange my grandsons with my ex-husband, and even then, I sat in the parking lot, trying to catch my breath and calm the anxiety surging through my body.

But today was different. Today, my bonus son wanted to take his dad out for Father’s Day, and this is where he chose after dinner. So I showed up. I put on my mom hat. I put on my wife hat. And I prayed for strength, prayed that I could carry myself with grace, and that my healing would be enough to get me through the next hour.

I walked in slowly, making my way almost to the back of the room. Deep breath in. Scan the crowd. Neither of them was there. For a moment, I felt the smallest wave of relief.

Then we got to lane 20, I looked to my left, and there she sat.

Another deep breath. My body tensed. That familiar trauma response kicked in. My mind raced, my pulse quickened, and every muscle in my body screamed to turn around and walk out. But in that moment, I heard a quiet voice in my heart say, “Don’t be afraid.”

So I stood there. The lights from the lanes flashed across faces and laughter echoed through the air, bouncing off walls that had witnessed the best and worst parts of my story. This wasn’t just a place with pins and pizza. This was where I had once celebrated as a wife, and where I had later unraveled as a broken, divorced woman.

I didn’t cross the line into the lanes today. I wasn’t ready for that. But I crossed another kind of threshold, the one between pain and peace, between fear and resilience.

Sometimes healing doesn’t look like forgiveness or forgetting. Sometimes, it just looks like walking in, breathing through it, and refusing to let the past define your present.