I'm Gonna Leave You Anyway

It's been 4 months since I found out you cheated on me for 8 years. It's been a year and 2 months since I moved out. It's been almost exactly a year since our cat died. I'm not sure how long any of this should affect me.

It's been 4 months.

I find myself thinking that when I lost what I knew about you I lost parts of what I knew about myself. I find myself struggling to hold on to some parts of our past because if everything is different in light of this betrayal, what was real in that third of my life? Is my affection for you now just in reaction to a string of lies?

I never love you in the moment. I only love you in the long-term. I only love you as a memory. And memories are always deceitful. We form memories. They're not factual. I only love you as the person I thought you were because I don't know who you really are.

Outside of selfish and self-serving. To which you would say "but everyone is", but are they?

We're both looking for someone else now. You're looking outside yourself. I'm looking at you. I'm looking at me. It's been 4 months and with each passing day I feel further from who I knew myself to be. With every passing moment I feel more adrift. I was better before I knew this. I was better before everything was a reminder of how dysfunctional things must have truly been.

Did you mean it when you said you loved me the other day? Should I take things as truth when they are hissed ruefully? Should I believe I love you or loved you when I'm still trying to put it all together? When I'm still trying to put myself together? I just want us to act like people. I just want us to be human adults. I want to be capable of talking things through without it always devolving to attacks. I want you to be able to own up to things without making it seem like my disjointed sense of reality now is in no way your problem. I guess it's not. I guess I can Alanis Morrisette you all I want, but reminding you of what you did isn't going to make things easier or you more likely to aid in resolution if you don't want to. I want to be able to walk away. I want to be able to not be the ugly side of things. I want to go back to the first few weeks when I thought I could forgive you. I want to go back to the moment before I knew. I want to go back to the days before I met you. I want to go back but there's no way. There's no way to transform reality, but you did. She did. I don't know how you did it. It's like a magic secret. Things existed in one form, for a long time, and then suddenly they were another. Suddenly everything seems so irreparably broken. I want to cut myself on the shards until I bleed out. Broken by a broken thing. I'll try to put it all back together but every piece is a puncture and there's nothing to stop the flow of disappointment. There's nothing to wrap my sorrows in.

I betrayed you, too. But I didn't live with that betrayal for a year afterwards. I didn't let that betrayal almost give us herpes. Everything you do seems to be compounding on the slight. Everything you are seems to be more and more disgusting. Less and less what I wanted. I dream of change but I don't think it's coming from either side.

I'm starting to see an end.

It wasn't what I wanted or expected.

I remember the first time we broke up and I told you I thought of you as someone I could marry in my 30s. Something I wasn't ready for. I always loved you in a future-tense. I always loved your potential. You were something I wasn't ready for.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Flower of Evil

Murder on the Dance Floor

As It Was