“Well, maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” my mother says
when I tell her I can’t eat and I’m losing weight as a result of my most recent
heartbreak, “maybe when all this is over you’ll look in the mirror and –” I
have just enough strength left in me to stop her before she completely echoes
the voice in the back of my head, the one that’s been telling me that not
eating for days, while it might fuck up my metabolism in the long run, might
also make me more attractive to potential new men in the short term.
But I don’t want to be attractive to new men – never mind the nagging fear that it's impossible. I just want my man to come back and erase
everything he’s done to me in the past nine months. I want to wake up tomorrow and have this all
be a bad dream – the cheating, the lies, the images in my mind of him holding
that conniving, revolting, vile girl in our bed, the searing pain in my heart
that keeps me awake nights – and I want to roll over and playfully punch him
where he sleeps next to me, tell him he’s in trouble for breaking my heart in a
dream.
But it’s not a dream.
He really did have an emotional and physical affair with the one person
in his life I truly despise. He really
did take six and a half years to pull down all my walls, slowly and
painstakingly convince me that it would only be a good thing to give him 100%
of my heart, propose to me and get an emphatic yes, and then take all my
vulnerabilities and torment me with them for months before finally confessing
to sleeping with her. And even the
confession was like pulling teeth, the lies piled on thick and fast and only
ever blasted away in pieces by my tearful fury and flying fists.
First it was a desire, that was all, then a kiss, forced
upon him, which he immediately regretted.
After I left the restaurant in tears and he followed me home an hour
later, I found out they’d slept together – only once, he said – and I
lost my mind. But upon forcibly taking
his phone and reading their texts to each other, I found out it could get
worse: he called her by the names he called me, ‘beautiful’ and ‘gorgeous’,
words it took me years to believe, bandied about as a blueprint for how to talk
to the other person in his life (I can’t call her a woman – if you knew her you’d understand why). I also discovered that when he said he’d cut
off all contact, said it as if he’d done so months ago, he meant two days
previously. Two days. The whole week that I was waiting for him to
decide my fate, when he was ‘cutting himself off from the outside world’ to
think about his needs and whether he wanted to share his life with me, he was
texting that cunt.
Rock bottom, right?
No, still not yet. After I kicked
him out, at 2am, I scoured his ipad for anything that could help me make sense
of this, find a footing or even just a timeline, since he took his phone back
before I could see when the emotional affair had started. I didn’t find any information about how long
he’d been seeing her, but I did find emails – long, heartfelt missives that
should have been for me, but were instead for her. Saying things like “here I am, laying my heart
utterly open for you, telling you my deepest concerns and holding nothing back”
and “I love you, and the strength of it surprises and scares me” and, perhaps
the worst because it comes directly from a fear I divulged to him that I’d
somehow tricked him into loving me: “You are the only girl I have spontaneously
told I love.”
I
tortured myself reading those emails – I’m still torturing myself reading
them. I’m terrified I’ll never be happy
again, that even if I do find someone who can make me feel loved, I’ll never
again feel as loved and adored and as safe
as I felt with him. But then if I felt
that safe with him, if he was the one person in the world I trusted with every
insecurity, every inch of my heart, and he could do this to me, and for so
long, and make me feel as if I was somehow lacking, I’d somehow driven him to
confusion over whether he wanted to be with me… I just don’t understand it.
And
I can’t figure out what I want or need.
Everyone keeps telling me to take care of myself – my mother wants
me to come home immediately, but he waited to do this until my safe place was
no longer that; my friends want me to get out of the flat and interact with the
world, sort of ‘fake it ’til I make it’, and sleep with other people
immediately (although obviously that requires someone to be attracted to me);
and he wants me to stay and ‘fix us’, which I’m not at all sure is possible but
which I want more than anything in the world.
If I
go, he and I can’t go to therapy together, can’t be face to face, and have less
of a chance to reconcile. On the other
hand, I don’t know that I ever will be able to forgive him, and while I’m here I’m
falling apart completely. I’m alone in
my flat all day, thinking of him and hurting and crying and searching for
answers I’ll never get, and when I do go out everything reminds me of him. I moved to London for him, so of course
everything about this city is infused with the good parts of our
relationship. Unfortunately, I also
shared the rest of my heart-homes with him: NYC, San Francisco, Rome,
Amsterdam, even the small LA town where I grew up. And I hate him for that, for taking away all
of my safe places by filling them with wonderful memories of our amazing
relationship and then breaking everything into a thousand shards.
I
hate myself too. For not being more
suspicious, so I might have caught the affair before it did so much damage
(maybe even before he proposed, which I still don’t understand why he would
do). For sticking around and supporting
him through his ‘confusion’ over our relationship, which really turned out to
be confusion about who he wanted and which I could never do anything about. For working so hard to support his career
when he was just going to throw me away like so much trash when he began it in
earnest. For torturing myself by
wracking my brain for times when something didn’t seem right: phone calls when
he was away where he acted distant and now I wonder if she was there; cryptic FB
statuses that I now think might have been meant for her; amazing lunches out
where he’d be all over me one minute and texting (probably her) the next. And most of all, I hate myself for still
loving him, for wanting so desperately for him to comfort me – because
he’s the only person who can comfort me right now, but he’s also the only one
who can’t.
One
thing I will say for myself: as desperately as I wanted to, I didn’t make a
move on my best guy friend when he came all the way from Oxford on a work day
just to spend a few hours with me. He
held me while I sobbed, and told me I was too good for this, that I’m crazy to
think nobody will ever love me again, and all I wanted was to take our
relationship a step further, to beg him to make me feel loved and wanted
again. But he is in a relationship, and
I am not her. I don’t use people for my own selfish ends,
and I do care about integrity and supporting my friends’ relationships and
being a decent human being, even when I am completely broken and desperate for
someone to hold the pieces in place, if only for a moment.
But
that was little comfort last night when I went to bed alone, again, and woke up
this morning to find, yet again, that it wasn’t a bad dream. When I peeled myself out of our bed and tried
not to start the day with tears. When I
opened the fridge door and looked at the yogurt and fruit my friend M had
brought me in a loving attempt to get me to eat anything, and felt like I might
throw up if I put anything in my aching stomach. When I closed the door, sat down on the
kitchen floor, and wept like a broken thing over and over again.
I
suppose I’ve stopped falling. This must
be rock bottom, I think, because the lies and the broken trust will be the same
even if I find out he’s still seeing her or he’s cheated other times. Now the only question that really matters is which
smooth-faced rock wall do I attempt to somehow climb to get out of here? I don’t know, but I’m hoping I can make a
decision soon, because it’s dark and cold down here at the bottom and I’m
quickly dehydrating from all the crying.
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