I've started a couple of blogs recently with 'I cannot believe I'm writing this' or 'I don't want to be writing this' and I have put a lot of things into this that I never expected to. Sometimes, writing this blog feels cathartic, because it's like finding a value to my stress container and just letting it all come out, and others, well other times it feels like drawing a knife across my skin and letting all the of my stress out, but it's painful. It's not just a moment of pain either, it's all the time afterwards feeling raw. Maybe a knife is a wrong metaphor; maybe it's more like coarse sandpaper. It hurts letting it out, and then it hurts as it's healing, but it does heal. I will just say that I've not been cutting myself or hurting myself with sandpaper. I have spent the last few weeks with cuts and scraps up my arms but that's because we've been doing work in the garden and the plants aren't so fond of being deadheaded or chopped back so they don't look like a jungle, so they scratch the heck out of my arms and legs.
Anyway, there was one thing that, when it happened, I pretty much thought I would never write about, but I'm thinking about writing about it, so I thought, why not just write it and then if you don't want to post it, that's okay. We'll see what tomorrow brings as to whether this blog sees the light of day.
A few years ago I was in a relationship. At the time, I thought it was amazing, but looking back on it, it was pretty rocky. We were both pretty volatile, probably pretty bad at communicating and really, we were both young. We did a lot together and I have a lot of memories with him and up until recently, they were memories I could still look back on and smile because we were over the worst of the post-breakup stuff and we were doing well at being friends. Complicated friends, yes, but friends all the same.
I'd gone past the stage of being like J.D. in Scrubs when he tells Turk that he misses him so much it hurt sometimes, though it still came out a bit when I was drunk because I was lonely and when I was with him when things were good, I wasn't lonely. I feel like I have been lonely for the past few years now and that is not a comfortable position to be in. Over the past few years we managed to settle back into a relationship where I could tell him anything and, I thought, he could tell me anything, or we could just go somewhere and do something and if there were moments or periods of silence, hell, that was fine. He cared about when I was struggling mentally. He was happy for me when I got the job I had been wanting for years, and I was happy for him when he bought his new house. We were weird, but we were getting there. Where exactly 'there' was, I didn't know, but still, we were talking and we were friendly and we were there to help each other when we needed it, and things were good. Or that was my perception of events anyway.
When we had split, he and his whole family deleted me off of all of their social media platforms. I've seen his mother in the town that I live in and she either doesn't recognise me or she just ignores me. I don't think she even knew we were back to talking, but it was hard, because he lived with his parents when we were together, so I was involved with them. I had a relationship with them and his sister and the rest of his family. When we split, I felt like I was losing the whole family. Granted, we didn't all get along famously, but I got along pretty well with a few of them and that was really hard. Losing all of them at once was really, really hard, but it was what it was. The reason I mention the social media thing is because the things that I knew about him and his life were what he chose to tell me. I knew what he wanted me to know, and nothing more, but I trusted him still, so why would I have needed to worry that he was lying to me? He was asking me to go away with him to Paris and Prague for work trips because I needed a break and I loved to travel and the company wasn't a bad thing for him either. I met him after-work drinks and stayed up in town because being away from my flat and with someone else is quite nice sometimes. He would come over to mine, he invited me over to his, he brought his new puppy to meet me; I had no reason to suspect anything. Except...
One morning in March, before the lockdown started, I woke up and I was just, something inside of me was just nagging. My heart was racing and it was like there was this buzz inside of my brain and in my chest. It wasn't words, but it was a feeling, though it was a feeling that seemed very directed. That feeling nagged at me or buzzed at me or raced inside of me until I found myself on Facebook looking through my memories and thinking something, somewhere, somehow, someone for some reason is trying to tell me something and I don't know the who, the what, the why, or the where, but I knew the when was now for some reason. I don't know whether it was because I was finally back on antidepressants to help my anxiety to calm down a bit, or whether it was just coincidence, but it was loud and consuming and annoying and I needed it to stop, so I followed where the feeling took me and I saw a photo of him that looked like a wedding. I sat there telling myself that there was no way it could be his wedding, but I think I already knew then that it was, so I found his profile and what little I could see of it and I saw that this wedding wasn't recent. This wedding has happened eight months ago, so the story that he told me about going on a stag do and getting stitched up by a mate because he wasn't the stag, well, turns out, massive lie. The trip he told me about that was work, work and then a holiday because he just needed to relax, lie. It was his honeymoon. The stories he told me about the little place that he went to relax where he drank the whole place out of a specific type of rum he liked, it was all lies. He would take his wedding ring off when I saw him, he never mentioned it at all. When I had been at his place a few months before the wedding and asked him point-blank if he was seeing anyone, he told me that there wasn't anyone because he didn't have the time. It was a big wedding; there's no way he wasn't engaged to his wife by then. Realising how much he had lied could have destroyed me. Saying I was hurt does not cut it. I felt like the ground fell out from beneath, not because I was holding a candle for him and thinking that one day we would figure it out, but because the last person I had ever thought that he would be was a cheater, and yet he was worse; he was an adulterer. He is an adulterer. And a liar. And it got me wondering about all the times he told me I was paranoid when he went out with his female friends. Was I paranoid, or was I just being gaslighted? I've had to accept the fact that I will probably never know.
The last message I sent to him was to say that if he had just told me he was married, I would have been happy for him, and I genuinely meant it. Had he told me he was with someone, the last few years would have looked very different for us for sure, but I like to think we would still have been friends. I might not have tit-ishly sent him a message when I was drunk - which I found out was the night before his wedding, if you're thinking the timing didn't already sound too ridiculous - apologising for messing us up because I had been on a really bad date and drank too much gin to try and make it at least mildly interesting. At this point, if I think of him, I can only think that there is no going back. There will never be a point where I could trust him again, not as a friend, not as a lover, not as anything. My parents have gone so far as to say they wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, which I get because we were together a long time. We went on holiday with my parents and they loved us together. The split was hard on them as well, and not just because they knew I was hurting.
I know there are probably people reading this thinking, 'the person I have most sympathy for is his wife'. Believe me, I have a lot of sympathy for her, too. I wrote her a message over Facebook and sent her screenshots of conversations that made his intentions and actions as well as the dates (after they were married) obvious, because yes, there are people with open marriages and everything, and I know nothing about her or their circumstances, but I would have hated someone to not tell me if they knew it was happening. I would hate to think that someone knew that the person I loved and the person I trusted was breaking that trust if that was what they were doing, and they didn't think I had a right to know that. Whether she read it or not, I don't know, but giving her the option of knowing felt like the right thing to do.
Lockdown came around at the right time for me. I wasn't sure what was going on with COVID and I had really struggled to go onto the medication I'm currently taking. I was a bit of a mess and that just floored me and I couldn't process it, so I spoke to work and I went back to my mum's place. I thought I would be there for a week's R&R then back to London. I was there for a week, and then with lockdown being what it was, my dad drove me back to London to get what I needed for three months. That three months turned into four, and then we talked about the money I was saving, how much I spend on the flat, how long it would be before I was back in the office and whether it made sense to just move everything into storage for a year and live with my parents to save the money I spend on a flat I'm not living in towards a deposit for a flat where I'm paying my own mortgage and not someone else's. As I've been packing up the flat I've found bits and pieces of things which are reminders of him. Most of them have ended up in the bin, and actually, I'm really glad about that.
One of the great things about leaving this flat, despite all of the packing trauma and trying to get rid of a lot of things and pack so many things and the trauma of actually getting it all out of a building where the lift doesn't run to the ground floor is that my next place, wherever it is, isn't a place where he's been. It's not a place where I've called 'Text me when you're home safe,' down the corridor after him as he's left or where the bookshelf that he gave me from his grandmother is sitting in the kitchen. My new place will have a sofa he's never sat on - not just one where the cushion doesn't have a mind of its own and tip you onto the floor. The wardrobe he built the first time in the first flat I lived alone in is going to the tip. If it wasn't chipboard, I would take it back to Manchester, chop it into pieces and burn it, because I'm still angry, but cleansing myself of the things which he was a part of is helping. Getting rid of things that feel like they're connected to him is really helping. Though there are some things which either he gave me or he was around for that I won't be getting rid of, like my gaming PC or the black and gold vases my Valentine's roses came in one year, but that's because I didn't just love them just because he gave them to me. I loved them as was.
This is making me question my opinion of Ginger Dave the certifiable hamster though. He might have been a little weirdo that dragged his boy bits across my friend's palm so she realised that Pets at Home told me he was a girl when he was actually a boy (I probably gave the poor sod an identity crisis) but the only person he ever pooped on was my ex-partner. Maybe he was trying to tell me something.
Whilst I'm thinking about it and talking/ writing about it, I should probably point out that when I found that photo, I was ashamed. I'm not the one who was married, but I felt horrific. I was in tears on the phone to one of the ladies from work and she was asking whether there was anyone I could talk to, and what was going through my head was that the people I could call or the people I could pop around and visit were married and this was going to change their opinion of me. It wouldn't matter that I didn't know, because somehow I should have. I was horrifically embarrassed. I was hurting inside out, I wasn't my self, I felt ill because of it, but I didn't feel like I could talk to anyone because I was terrified that they would judge me and I was just so ashamed of myself. I have had to go over it time and time again in my head that it was not my fault. I have spoken to a couple of the ladies from work who struggle with anxiety and who would know where I was coming from and even that was so hard because I didn't want them to have a changed opinion of me, but they were amazing. They were supportive and they helped me to get through it. One of them called him a rat; a love rat and reminded me that I couldn't have known. That line that I would never cross, I crossed it blindfolded with him leading the way. If things had been different, if I had known about his wife, it's not a line I would have gone across, because, to me, marriage is important. Taking a vow of forsaking all others is really important. I used to think I would never get married because I wanted to be a lot like my great aunt and travel and be myself and, well, now I worry that it will never happen because every date I've been on for a while has been horrific, and things just don't seem to stick, but maybe it's like spaghetti. You know spaghetti is cooked to ready when it sticks to the wall. Maybe my spaghetti is just not ready yet, so it's not sticking. If I found the right person, making that commitment wouldn't be a difficult decision, I don't think. Keeping my promise, keeping my vow to forsake all others wouldn't be difficult, I don't believe, because it means a lot to me. It's something that means a lot in my family, so I refuse to feel guilty and I refuse to feel ashamed about something that wasn't my fault and it wasn't my error. I'm not some sort of homewrecker. He's a man who lied to everyone around him and chose to cheat on his wife, and that is not my fault, so I won't take on that guilt.
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