Meet Denise Wilson, a fairly conventional woman whose successful but uninspiring life is about to be turned upside down. Her partner of fifteen years has decided she's not the right girl for him. He wants "options". Simultaneously, the housing bubble bursts and with it goes her six-figure job as an interior designer for a large spec builder. At age fifty she's faced with a blank sheet of life in front of her and not a single idea what to do with it. So she buys a ticket to Maui. "Nothing Matters" is an entertaining spiritual road trip taken with a good friend. It has all the requisite elements of a good story: quirky characters, serendipitous events and an unexpected ending, all told with a deft sense of humor. "Nothing Matters" is the literary equivalent of "Eat, Love, Pray" running smack-dab into "The Power of Now". Part travelogue, part transformational journey, "Nothing Matters" puts the "light" back in enlightenment.

Nothing Matters

By Denise J. Wilson

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2011 Denise J. Wilson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-3881-5

Chapter One

Villain #1

The Ex-boyfriend. Of Course.

I can't believe it. I'd been with the guy 15 years and here he was, standing in my kitchen, telling me: "I don't think you're the girl for me." And he was saying it so calmly. Like, can I have a Diet Coke? This, after

I'd just told him I was considering putting my place up for rent. Which implied I was taking him up on his offer to move back in with him. It's February, 2009. We'd broken up before, four years prior, at which point I'd moved out. Eventually I bought a place of my own in the same condo complex he lived in. I know, I know, stupid. But it seemed inevitable that we were to be together so I bought the place. After awhile, he programmed a garage door opener that allowed him to walk out his front door and into my house with the click of a button. Every night when I heard the garage door humming up, I knew he was home.

So here he was initiating another break up. Okay, I thought. I can deal with this. The tricky part was he was my boss, too.

"Do you want me to find another job?" I asked.

"Hell no!"

I mentally breathed a sigh of relief. I loved my job. I managed to keep working for him through the first breakup and I knew I could do it again. We'd still be friends. This wasn't going to be some drama-filled, nasty split. I'd still be able to talk to him. He'd still be my best friend. And life would be relatively normal, which is something I always craved.

He'd called me out on that one before. "You'll do anything to keep things the same, won't you?" It wasn't said in a flattering light. It was during a phone conversation midway through our relationship when I'd called to apologize after a fight. I'd done nothing wrong. But I was so desperate for normal, I swallowed really hard and dialed his number as I was driving.

"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings." It was pathetic, looking back. Weak. And of all things, he detested weakness more than anything. The contempt in his rebuke of my apology was as dry and harsh as a Georgia O'Keefe skull baking in the New Mexico desert. I hung up, thinking it was over.

It was a weird game, now that I look back. He'd say things to make me prove that I really wanted him. And I'd say them. Of course it was my fault, too, because I played along.

I chose this person and the breakup as Villain #1 because it was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me, in terms of emotional size. And it took something this big to get me to a whole other place. It represents 15 years of stripping away the tricky things I'd say to myself to make everything fit a vision that I deemed appropriate. Or the way I would rehearse a story to make sure it was received in a way that made me look however I wanted to be perceived. For example, wanting people to think of me as a victim of someone else's reprehensible behavior, when I really was complicit in allowing the behavior to happen. Or wanting people to think of me as a brilliant problem-solver, without actually saying it. I would just use carefully selected words and a sequence of sentences that would lead whoever I was talking with to that conclusion. I would modestly leave off the part about my being brilliant. But the net effect I was trying to achieve was to leave my audience in awe, silently thinking, "Wow, she's really smart. I wish I could be her!"

So, a little back story. Actually, it's the whole story because the part above was the end.

I met Joe in 1990 when I was a fledgling real estate agent. Early one afternoon, with nothing to do, I decided preview the inventory available to buyers—in case I should happen to run into one. Joe was finishing one of his first houses in an upscale, gated neighborhood in a little bedroom community that boasted 99% white people. The other 1% was Scandinavian. Just kidding. But really, there were no black people. No Hispanics. No Koreans. No East Indians. And given this was Washington State, white really meant white. As in, these people can't even get enough of a tan where the word "ethnic?" might briefly cross your mind.

I'd just finished wandering through a house when one of the subdivision's builders came barging through the front door. "Are you an agent?" he demanded. "Uh, yes," I responded, trying to sound competent, even though it was still my temporary license hanging in my broker's office. "We need somebody new. So-and-so hasn't done a goddamn thing to bring us offers. And we're dyin'. We're dyin' on the vine." (He was from the south. Texas or someplace where the alphabet's been reduced to 25 letters.) "Alright," I said slowly, stringing out the word till I could come up with some Realtor-like pronouncement. "Let me go back to my office and put together a proposal." I was buying myself some time. I've never been good at spontaneity. My best lines always come when I'm five miles down the road and the surly sales clerk is busy honing her inattentiveness to new, unfathomable levels on her next customer.

I went back to the office and worked hard to craft a winning marketing proposal, complete with easels and storyboards. I presented the plan to the subdivision's four builders, Joe being one of the four. By the end of the presentation, I'd signed up two of the builders. Joe and the fourth builder told me they'd already promised their listings to another agent. No problem, I responded, considering myself lucky to have gotten two of the four.

Long story short, the other agent dropped the ball and I ended up with Joe as a client. He was married. So was I. But I loved talking to him. I got that excited feeling in my stomach when he would walk into one of my Sunday open houses to see how things were going. It was flirting. No doubt. But in that crafty part of the mind where stories are carefully put together to make questionable actions sound innocent enough, one could say nothing untoward was going on. But "toward" was never so electric.

I sold Joe's two spec houses that year and our business relationship came to an end. In the ensuing years, I'd hear from him periodically. Like the time he and a business partner bought a piece of land for the value of the timber on it. They logged the piece then decided to put up a spec house, which would be pure profit. Joe called for my advice. I gave it, then hung up. I sat at my desk for a minute, recalling everything about Joe I could. How his mustache gave him a Clark Gable quality that I always fell for. The distinct sharp, acidic smell when he passed by. It wasn't unpleasant, but it wasn't like the best cologne I'd ever smelled either. Maybe it was the chemicals listed in microscopic print on the Diet Pepsi's he downed, six-pack at a time, oozing through his pores. Whatever it was, it was his distinct smell. And that sarcastic smile when he said something designed to provoke. Which he was expert at. Sometimes (a lot of times, frankly) he said stuff just to see the outrage. It gave him a sense of power. I think this now. But I was totally subject to it then. Age brings with it tiredness—or at least a focus that youthful energy obscures. I composed myself and got back to work, wondering if I would ever hear from him again.

I did. Almost a year later, although I couldn't believe it had been that long. Even in my early thirties, I was amazed at how quickly time passes. Like going into the movies at 4pm. When you walk out at 6, into the setting sun, you think, "What the heck?! What happened?" As an aside, I think that's precisely what occurs when you're lying on your deathbed. You look around and shake your head. "How can I be here? I still remember what it was like to be 17."

That afternoon, Joe stopped by my office. "Just passing by," he said. He smiled. So did I. We talked for a while. It was one of those conversations that make absolutely no sense. You're not really even paying attention to the words—you're just looking into the eyes of the other person to see if the electricity matches your own. After a few minutes, he walked out the door and I walked back to my desk. Still smiling.

Another year passed. I was busy. I had two children, but I was unhappy in my marriage. My husband and I had drifted apart. So cliché. Actually, he hadn't drifted anywhere. He was still in that bog of complacency that I was trying to lift myself out of, one squishy, shoe-sucking, mud-slurping leg lift at a time. I had changed. After ten years of marriage, with kids now in school, I was making money. I was contributing to the net worth of the household. My husband thought it was great. He loved the extra money. In fact, when I told him I wanted a divorce, his knee-jerk response wasn't tears or anger, it was, "What?! We finally can afford everything we want!" I was stunned.

But there's something organic that changes when a woman discovers that she has a tangible value beyond the non-monetized worth of being a mother and a wife. When you're holding a paycheck in one hand and a new-found status in the business world in the other, previously held notions about how you should be treated and what additional value you have come up for cross-examination. One evening, with frying pans soaking and the laundry tumbling, you might find your head tilting to one side. "Wait a minute," the thought bubble appears. "What's wrong with this picture?" Whether or not the picture is perfect, the question itself is enough to ruin even a good thing.

This is beginning to feel like a Reader's Digest version of my life, but I'm fast-forwarding to get to the important stuff.

On July 31st, 1994, I heard my soon-to-be-ex-husband in the kitchen. It was early on a Saturday morning. He was going to work—not typical. Since he'd retired from the Army, he'd been a Monday-through-Friday man (although he was prone to sit in front of the television with the first iteration of laptops, tapping away at "work," which could have been his code word for porn for all I knew).

The kids were asleep, for which I was grateful. He was surprised when he turned around to find me in the doorway.

"I'm leaving," I said. It couldn't have been a total shock, though the look on his face said it was. I'd told him six months before that I was incredibly unhappy and that things had to change. I couldn't work all day only to race home to piles of laundry, dinner to cook and a house to clean. For two weeks he did the dishes. After that, life slid right back into its 13-years-in-the-making routine.

There was no preamble to my blurting out that I was leaving. I've always sucked at good-byes and this was no exception. I rattled off something about the kids and how that was taken care of. Then I looked at him and said, "I am not in the right spot." Which was the truest thing I'd probably ever said up until that point. I knew he wouldn't understand what I meant, mainly because he didn't believe in anything that couldn't be identified by one of the five senses. I just knew, deep down where words spread out into dark, unrecognizable forms and you only have your gut instincts to rely on, that I had to leave.

He went to work and I moved to an apartment four blocks away.

What's left out in this re-hashing is most of the emotion and wavering and panic-attackedness that surrounded getting divorced. It's so easy to look back from this vantage point and say, "Oh yeah, I just felt like it was time to move on, so I did." Hardly. I was a real estate agent which meant my income was tied to commissions and thus unpredictable. Plus—even bigger consideration—I had two children and I knew they wouldn't take it well. Even thought his was the mid-1990s, none of their friends' parents were divorced. If they ended up on drugs or on Oprah, I'd never forgive myself.

But I seem to have a steel rod inside me that keeps me erect when I need it. Some people have called it stubbornness, but I prefer the steel rod visual.

Six months later, Joe and I connected. Six months after that, we moved in together. Here's the next 10 years in summary:

Joe grew his construction company into a 60-80 home per year spec home business. After seven or eight years, I segued from real estate agent to project manager for his company. We made a great team. Both of us thought in business terms and were unemotional when it came to hard choices.

We had some great times together. We travelled a lot. We visited remote corners of the world. He was a great travel companion. The only times we ever fought were over map-reading and directions. Minor stuff.

Then came break up #1. We'd been together ten years and we'd just sold our house. It was Saturday morning and we were in the office catching up on paperwork. I could tell something was wrong. He snipped at everything I said. Curt, sarcastic responses and that upward tilting of the eyebrows that said, "Really? You're interrupting my train of thought for that?"

I retreated to my desk and tapped away on the computer. Before long, Joe came over and stood beside me. "When we move," he began, "I think we should get separate places."

That was a brick thrown right at my head. In moments like this, when I have no possible idea how to respond, I fall silent. My mind is like an old Commodore 64: slow to boot up and not equipped with a great range of functionality. "Okay," I drew out the word hoping another a coherent thought might form, but nope. Nothing.

That afternoon, I packed up some clothes and went to the nearest Extended Stay America. The next day Joe appeared. "That was a mistake," he said. "Come on." He picked up my still-packed suitcase and took me home.

Of course that didn't last. Although he said he wanted to be together, he didn't really. He was miserable. His happiness quotient was in the low single digits. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I told him I wanted him to be happy and part of that meant getting rid of me. He didn't deny it.

So, we parted as a couple but I remained an employee. During that first year apart, Joe bought a condo in the first "green" project in Tacoma and urged me to do the same. This was before the great real estate bubble burst. Prices were going up monthly, if not daily—especially on downtown condos which were a hot commodity in once sleepy Tacoma. After years of being in Seattle's shadow, finally Tacoma had a kind of hip vibe going on. It was as if the city collectively woke up one morning and discovered that black socks and sandals really were a bad look and traded them in for a pair of Tevas.

It seemed financially silly to be sitting on the sidelines paying rent on an apartment when I could be watching equity grow. So, I bought a condo in the same complex. (Yes, I'm laughing at the ridiculousness of this even as I'm typing the words.)

Joe and I drifted back together. We spent most evenings together, watching television, talking, being each other's sounding boards for everything. Fast forward another three years and we're back in my kitchen, with Joe standing at the counter saying those words, "You're not the girl for me."

Turns out, he'd been exploring his options when it came to finding the perfect girl.

Which brings me back to the fact that I had told him I was putting my place up for rent. Funny how the universe grabs you by the shirt collar and hauls you back just as you're about to step off a cliff.

I am forever grateful for that. And I'm in incredible awe for everything that has happened since.

Chapter Two

Villain #2

The Parents. Screw Dr. Phil.

I once heard a theory about how we came to be born into the families we have. It's stuck with me and I pull it up from time to time when I need a reminder about how to be grateful.

I woke up in the middle of the night about a year before Joe and I broke up for good. He was lying next to me sleeping like a rock and I found myself wide awake wondering how you spell Hoda Kotb's name.

Years before, I'd been a Today Show devotee. Every so often, a reporter named Hoda Kotb would report on something. She wasn't remarkable, as far as I was concerned. She wasn't brilliant, nor did she sport some kind of haircut I thought about copying. In fact, in the seven or so years that had passed since I'd watched the show, she never even crossed my mind. So what was I doing lying in bed in the middle of the night putting together vowels and consonants in various patterns, trying to get the spelling of her name right? After 15 minutes or so, I finally asked myself, "Are you crazy? Who cares how she spells her name?" I rolled over and willed myself back to sleep.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Nothing Mattersby Denise J. Wilson Copyright © 2011 by Denise J. Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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