Auditing my life

I don't like cash.

I pay for everything I can with plastic or electronic money. I carry no balances. I earn miles. I think it's easier to manage my finances when a company logs every transaction for me.

I'm assembling tax info for my 2005 taxes, which remain unresolved, first due to divorce uncertainty, then due to general procrastination on my part. But it looks like I'll be owed a refund, so there's less urgency.

I've been auditing all the credit card and debit card statements from 2005, assembling expenditure records.

It's a financial log of that year.

There are the charges for the airfare the time in early '05 that my ex left to go to see her parents in greater Boston, then told me on the phone from the East Coast she wasn't coming back. The first time she brought up issues in our relationship I thought she didn't know or care about.

There's the charge for when she did book the flight back. Which came a few days before our last joint counseling session, which preceded the last time we made love. Which may have been the first time she got pregnant. (Months later she explained a need for cash citing a large medical expense which she only explained with a tearful "something happened" that still haunts me.)

There are the charges for her storage, after she moved out with all the stuff from our married life which she wanted, even though she had no place to put it, while she lived in homeless, jobless limbo.

There's the charge for her airfare when she chose to go to Greece to spend 2 months with her cousins.

There are charges from her living in SF with friends and going on job interviews. There are charges from her buying gas and groceries (and clothes... she shopped to feel better) and dinners out in the various neighborhoods here and in MA. I knew where she was and what she was doing only by the credit card statements.

And then she stopped using the card. And my window into her life (and some of my obligation to pay for it) was closed.