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I am afraid of losing all that I have ever known. I feel like I can’t tell anyone about this because if I’m not willing to leave him, then no one can know.
As for the answer to your question, here is how I get through the days: I spend every moment I am alone asking myself what sort of future I want. Instead of thinking of what has happened, I think of what will make me happy one day, hopefully soon.
It is almost as if I have to become some other version of myself in order to muster the enthusiasm for both of us lately. But I do it because I still believe in the future I’m hoping for: a family with the man I chose.
Do you ever feel like your life got away from you somehow? Lately, it feels like my whole life has a similar feeling to when you check the clock on a Saturday and realize it’s already half past four.
I can see ways in which she and I had lost touch with one another long before this. It’s almost as if realizing she was lying about one thing has made me realize how often she and I lie to one another about small things.
Lying has just become so much easier than telling the truth. I don’t remember when things got so hard. But life has been a matter of keeping our heads above water for years now.
I imagine that my husband looks at your wife and sees a real woman. And I am afraid that I will lose the life I have built to a woman who can give him what he wants.
I’ve always been struck by the idea that you can’t be all that happy something has returned if it doesn’t go away in the first place.
“I have never loved before. If this is what love is.”
I cannot believe he wrote that to her. Days later, I still hear it reverberating in my head over and over and over. I have never felt so alone. Alone in the world and alone in my marriage. Alone in love, really. With a man who claims he never loved me.
Sometimes, when I am lying in bed next to Ken and I can’t sleep, I feel so hopelessly pathetic. So unloved, so unremarkable. I feel like the girl at the party nobody wants to dance with.
There I am, hoping someone might choose me, while the rest of the world goes on dancing. But lately I find that in those moments, I think of you. I am not alone at the party. You are at this miserable party with me. And it brings a smile to my face to be standing next to you.
Sometimes I think mine might turn to stone any minute now, and yet every time I see you I soften, reminded of how you still choose kindness over anger at every step.
It seems as if you see me exactly as I wish to be seen. There is no greater gift than that.
Compromises are normal, heartbreak is commonplace, et cetera, et cetera.
David, For so long I have felt as if I am a disappointment to so many. To my parents, for my choices. To my husband, for what I cannot give him. And now, in many ways, even to myself. For how I am handling all this. When I was a teenager, one of our neighbors, Mr. Weddington, was caught having an affair with his secretary. And I remember feeling so disgusted when Mrs. Weddington took him back. I could not, for the life of me, understand why that woman would embarrass herself by accepting his transgressions. And yet here I am. Doing almost the very same. And it is enough to depress me. But then
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“I could never get back what we had by marrying him. I can only get that back by staying with you.”
I needed so badly to see that regardless of whether I could carry a child, I was still me, still worth something. And no matter what my husband thought of me, I was still important. And while my mother often reminds me that I should have been able to see that myself, I am so thankful that you helped me get there. You gave me hope and perspective and confidence.
