Invisible Wife

I can’t fucking breathe. I look down, sure the blood from the shot to my heart will be pouring down to the kitchen floor like the tears on my cheeks.

Nothing is there. I look up, see a stranger where my husband of 15 years stands.

The stranger is still talking, but I cannot hear anything over the sound of the breaking of every hope and dream I’ve had between the life we built for the last 15 years. I can’t fucking hear.

“ I just don’t feel the same about you.I haven’t for awhile. I don’t want to hurt you, but yea. Sorry.”

With those couple sentences he takes our life as I knew it and begins to rip it all apart.

It is nothing compared to what will come in the next days, but how am I to know that now? I run to our bedroom, chest heaving, certain he will follow to tell me he is mistaken. Certain that this isn’t happening…I had no idea. I had no clue there was anything amiss. I was so blindsided as my heart bleeds because she already knows what I had hidden from myself.

There is another that has taken my place.

He leaves our home 5 minutes later to go fuck her, to be validated with his brave decision to tell his wife his feelings,to leave her and his children to pick up pieces of a life that now makes no sense to them, to finally untie the knots that bind- while I try to make sense of what just happened.

I can’t fucking comprehend this. Tears become my constant companion, while relief becomes his.

~~~~~~

He lies. And lies. But I can see through it, I force myself to find some dignity and make him leave our home, the home where we raise our children, the home where we love and work and share a life.

He is no longer welcome as a member here, he is now a visitor. He seems suprised. He thought it would stay the same. He has justified his actions to himself enough that he cannot fathom anything but his own needs, his own wants.

He is a stranger. He tells our children. He tells me nothing. I become the enemy. He has rewritten so much of the recent past that I quickly realize this is much deeper than I had imagined.

I’m now the enemy. The wife who neglected her husband so much he had no choice but to find another. The wife who deserved to be betrayed, for she should have seen it coming. The wife who will be fine raising our children alone, everyone will be “fine”. This is all the fault of the Wife.

Of me. I believe this for to long.

Until I don’t.

~~~~~~~~

Days turn into weeks.

He pulls father away from us, and closer to her.

He flaunts his new life around, wondering why he isn’t as happy as he is portraying himself to be. She is his only constant, he says. His biggest supporter. Everyone else has turned their back to him, or moved to support the ones he has so casually discarded.

He is so angry at me.

The Wife is always the enemy, she made me do this, she is punishing me now, she-she-she

Deserved to be left.

I no longer believe the lies.

I also no longer trust, sadly I no longer trust myself, for I am also the betrayer, the betrayal of myself is the hardest part to accept. My own failings are the ones rising to the top of the emotional heap as I do my best to understand them, to also justify them, to-

Finally take off the blinders and see.

I don’t like what I see. What I have allowed for so long. Who I accepted myself to become.

There is no catalyst in life like betrayal. It reaches every part, every mundane and every deep recess of your psyche.

The lies we tell ourselves will be our downfall.

I will love you forever. I will never leave you. You matter to me. Our family is most important to me. I promise to cherish you. To stand by you in good times and bad.

Until He doesn’t.

His justification for giving to another what was once yours will forever be imprinted on the wounds he ripped open and left gaping, left for you to sew together with the shards you pick up from the remnants of your shattered heart, and you try. Damn you try.

The days turn into weeks and you limp along, each moment life goes on without you, as you look around in disbelief because you are still drowning, you are still struggling, you are still not able to fucking breathe but you try. For the little souls that are begging you to fix it, for the little hands that tightly hold you as they sob with no understanding of why Daddy left to be with another, the little souls who ask with accusing eyes “why did Daddy leave”?

You try to keep it together.

You accept the unacceptable.

And then he knocks at the door

“Can I come Home”

Yet-Home doesn’t exist anymore.