When you feel apathy about everything, except thoughts of killing yourself, you know your life isn’t yours anymore. You don’t know where it’s gone, you don’t know who it belongs to, but you know it’s not yours any longer. I know very few things in my life to be true. I am 5’5” inches. That will change though; I will shrink with time. My eyes are hazel, so it appears my eyes change color with outfits. My hair is brown, turning white. It’s skipping gray all together. I was white blonde as a child. My feet even have shrunk a whole shoe size with all the weight I have lost. I’ve been the same shoe size since I was 11 years old. Things that should identify us and be “who we are” change so it shouldn’t come as such a shock to me that my husband didn’t want to be my husband anymore. Yet I am shocked. Devastated. To the point of being barely able to function.
With that in mind, I decided to tell my husband about the boyfriend. Actually, he reached out to me first. It appeared something happened between her and the boyfriend. I however, was being portrayed as the villain. This didn’t add up to me. The three of them had known about each other the whole time. I had known nothing. The boyfriend had asked her to tell me or have my husband tell me about her more than once but that had never happened. They wanted their sick secret to be kept just that. My husband killed her head with stories of how awful I was when in fact he was just sneaking off to talk to her and leaving me alone wondering.
I wasn’t this awful person he made me to be. I’m sure there was some truth in some of what he said, sometimes, but from most of what I’ve heard he just told lies about me. There was one night where we got in this big fight, you may remember it, when I found he had been looking up honeymoons? I went through his closet that night. I ripped all of his clothes off the shelves and left them in a pile on the floor. I was looking for some proof of her. I found one shirt that I didn’t recognize and still had tags on it. Nothing he would ever wear. I cut it up and left it on top. I acknowledged what I did and even apologized for it. My hindsight told me he had been spending his days off at the dues get outlets with her. I apologized because after I did it I worried it was from one of the kids, but like I said, it was nothing I had ever seen before. Lo and behold, one of the stories he told her was I her was that I had cut up his winter coat. So, she bought him an eerily similar winter coat to that of her boyfriend’s. Funny how when you’re the “victim” the truth isn’t all that horrific. Again, not that cutting the shirt up was right…. but…. not that bad.
So, my husband told me multiple times how awful I was for dragging her poor, innocent boyfriend into this mess. How he didn’t do anything to deserve this and I was just trying to start trouble. I was dumbfounded. I laid out the facts to him. He was her boyfriend, not roommate, as she told my husband. I wasn’t trying to start any trouble. He knew all about him. How he knew the secrets my husband had been telling his girlfriend. Our secrets. He looked at me shamefully. His eyes filled with tears several times. There wasn’t much he could say. He had betrayed me. Us. She had betrayed him. I had been told about it. He had been caught. He was still trying to make me feel guilty and responsible for any fallout that happened.
I never in a million years could have seen coming what came. They turned it on me somehow. That I was the crazy one. I saw it with my own two eyes. I saw the texts between them while they were broken up for just a few days. Hell, it could have been hours. But somehow, they twisted their whole mess into my fault. They made me the bad guy. All the people’s lives the ruined. All the people whose lives they affected. And they made it out that I wrecked it.
My own husband. Who I love more than anyone in the world. Was villainizing me to this whore. They were the liars. The wreckers of lives. Dreams. Happiness. Anything I had once loved. Had any interest in. This man was my rock. All he wrote to her was that he was running to her and making it better for her. She had someone to do that. He was her second best. Even as I offered these heartbreaking things to him that she had been gaslighting him, I offered to be there for him. Someone to listen. Dinner if he needed it. A shoulder to cry on.
Did I want to listen to him cry about her? No. But I wanted to listen to him. I wanted to be there for him. Because I understood him. I loved him. I knew how he slept at night. What he ate for breakfast. How his mind ticks. I know when he thinks about a project he sticks his tongue out ever so slightly. He rubs his temples when he’s stressed. He curls up in the fetal position when he doesn’t want to talk.
That’s how he spent the last two months of our marriage together. Curled up in the fetal position. Keeping everything from me. While I tried to make it better. You can’t fix something if only one side wants it. I want to think that I can love him enough for both of us. I am slowly starting to think that I can’t.
Yet, my love for him is still overwhelming to me. It keeps me up at night. When I see him it oozes from my pores. I melt. My insides instantly turn to mush. I still get butterflies. I want to hug him. Kiss him. Find all the places we fit together. Put my hand in his. Feel his face. Walk with him. Talk with him. About nothing. Sit with him. Listen to him snore. Listen to his apnea. I have never had anyone have this kind of effect on me. That is how I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. It is unnerving. Uncanny. Uncharacteristic. Unfathomable. My life that had been in a constant state of chaos until he came along. He grounded me and everything in it. I thought he made me a better person. Maybe I was just a game to him. Instead I have been alienated from my life. He changed all that to make it all become a mystery to me. My mind, my body, my soul and especially my husband.
Never had a white picket fence 