Four years ago, I picked my WS up from the airport after he had been away for three months doing a residency for his work. I am not kidding when I say he actually looked like a stranger to me. It was one of the weirdest moments of my life. We had been together for nine years, and in that time we had made it through a lot of time apart. He lived for a year across the country from me; I knew how strange it can be to see your loved one after so much time apart. This was different. I actually didn’t even hug him; it was like I didn’t know him.
While he was gone, we had become increasingly distant. No – HE had become increasingly distant. I have years of our email exchanges saved. The year he was living across country he emailed me every. single. day. Messages of love and hope and the future we were planning. He sent gifts and phoned as often as he could. I wrote long letters on paper and sent care packages. We were really young back then, and just starting out, and there was so much love. In the years since, we had often been apart and he would email me often, sending pictures and updates on his day. This time, though, things had been off almost from the beginning. Phone calls became fewer, and emails almost nonexistent. I was still sending him messages every day, but I wasn’t getting much in return.
I had been with my WS for nine years, since we were in our early twenties, and I thought I knew him so well. I trusted him completely, and the idea of him heading off for the summer to have an affair was inconceivable to me. But as things became stranger between us, I became increasingly anxious and upset. Eventually, I said my fears out loud and told him I felt like he had betrayed me. It came out of nowhere, it wasn’t even a thought I had articulated to myself, but I obviously needed to say it out loud. He became very quiet and very angry, and hung up. The next day, I woke up in a panic and felt like I had done immeasurable harm to our relationship by doubting him. I called and apologized and he told me that when he came home we would need to talk about “my communication skills.”
Of course, in reality he had been sleeping with the OW for a month. In reality, he went to her that night and told her what I had said. And she said something about how I must be really perceptive to suspect something, and maybe he should tell me the truth so that I would know about their relationship and their love. Because of course, they were going to be together in the real world and lalalalalala.
So four years ago, I picked my WS up at the airport with all of this between us and I didn’t even know who he was. We were still far from home as I had been staying at my family’s for the summer. So we packed up our truck and headed across Canada and I was driving with a fucking stranger away from my family and my friends back to a place where I had no one, only this stranger and I was having panic attacks the whole way. Smoking cigarettes nonstop and drinking too much coffee and listening to my own music with my earphones on and wondering what the fuck to do. Actually thinking about throwing myself out of the truck as we sped down the highway.
On day two, he started talking about us breaking up because we just weren’t compatible. We didn’t have anything good between us – money talk sex work life love. All of it was terrible. I was terrible. I wasn’t the right person for him. Our sex life sucked oh it sucked he kept coming back to that. And how bad I was at communicating. How terrible it was that I had accused him of betraying me. Oh, and our sex life, it was so bad. I sat in the passenger seat and cried and cried and cried. I cried for the end of what I had thought was going to be my future, and I cried because the man that I loved and that I thought was my softest safest spot in the world thought I was such an awful person at so many things. And I cried because he was a fucking stranger. Who was this man? Where did the gentle and loving man that I knew before he went away, go? Why didn’t he come back to me?
On day three of our drive, I started asking him if he had met someone else. It just seemed like that was the only thing that could explain what had happened to us, to him. I asked him every hour, then every half hour. I asked asked and asked again and kept asking. That night we were in some Motel 6 in some American city, and we were sleeping in separate beds. I sat up, it was the middle of the night, figuring out where we were and where the bus depot was, and how I could get back home without being in the truck with him for another day. I packed up my stuff, and said goodbye to our dog, and walked out of the hotel room. It woke him up and he came after me and asked where I was going. He then offered to drive me to the bus station himself, which was so crazy! So unlike him! This is a man who drove across the country to bring his sister home himself when she broke up with her fiancé. He is such a caring man, and he looked at me destroyed, utterly destroyed, and offered to drive me to the bus station. And I asked again, who is she please tell me, I deserve to know what is really happening to us. And finally, he admitted it, finally he told me yes, there was someone else.
The rest of the night is a blur in which I act like a crazed person in the parking lot of a Motel 6 in some American city. In which I run across a highway to a gas station and call my sister and wake her up and stand in a gas station in bare feet and cry on a pay phone for two hours. In which my WS stands outside the gas station watching me because he doesn’t want anything to happen to me – which is ironic, because the worst thing already had and he had done it to me. A blur of a night in which my WS continues to lie to me about what really happened, only telling me a few details that he thinks I can “handle” which in retrospect was probably a good thing. I probably couldn’t have handled it all.
At some point, exhaustion hit me and I fell asleep in the hotel room and woke up the next morning to a horrible, burned out world and we drove the last leg of our journey home while I cried and asked questions and smoked a thousand cigarettes and threw up and smoked and cried some more. We made it home, to our little lovely house in the middle of the big city and I fell down on the ground and thought about leaving it all behind, leaving him behind. I almost did.
Instead, I stayed. And things slowly got better with MC and IC and we ended up pregnant a year after dday and our daughter just turned two. And it has been four years and they have mostly been good.
But this is it, the real truth – I don’t know if I will ever stop feeling the sting of the things he said to me on that drive. I don’t know if I will ever stop feeling like I’m not good enough for him to love. I try, I do. I just think he killed something inside of me that day, something that he had been responsible for creating in the first place. His love, it was such a generous and whole hearted thing. And that he offered it to me, it made me feel beautiful in a way nothing had before. That is gone, forever, and I grieve it still, almost every day. I know, I do – self worth comes from the self. That isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m smart, I look good for my age, I am a great mom, a good friend, a good partner, a wonderful sister and friend. This is something else I am talking about, something that was emotional and existed solely because of the love we shared. It has to do with how I thought he felt about me, and how that made me feel - safe, loved, cherished.
This time of year is crazy hard for me. I feel it in my bones, his betrayal. Not just with her, but of me in his heart when he said those things about me, when he tried to make me not good enough. Even after four years, this time of year I am still laying on the ground and thinking about leaving it all behind.
