Bloodletting

Dear C,

First of all, I want you to know that I love you. Secondly, I want you to know that I have never been so mad at you. I could hunt around for a synonym that would sound more eloquent, and that I meant it more— but mad feels right. A word I picked up early on in my childhood to blanket cover a lot of confusing emotions that I don't like. But my therapist wants me to articulate.

What I should say is:

I’m impassioned.

I’m confused.

I am angry.

I feel alienated.

I feel despondent.

Betrayed.

Disengaged.

Pressured.

Miserable.

And it’s all because of what you did. Have done. Doing? I don’t know anymore, trust feels like something that died out with the dinosaurs.

If I hadn’t of accidentally closed out of my design tab, I may never have found out.

Finding out was like falling into the deep end of the pool and being unable to swim. I flap my arms around, trying to find something to grab onto and splutter as the water bobs me up and down, trying to keep water from filling my nose and mouth. I yell, but water fills my mouth. No one can hear me. I’m in an echo chamber of my own thoughts.

My rational mind disappears and suddenly, I’m tearing through everything to find what else you hid from me. I can’t run; I can only stay and fight, and right now, I need ammo.

I look through your whole history. Porn. So much porn, interspersed between medical questions and searches of medication reactions. Perfect porno dolls with dead eyes, bodily worshipping mediocre looking men with meaty dicks.

You’re kinky; flashbacks come back about you wanting to get more creative with our sex life and making me feel like a prude because I wasn’t comfortable with some of the creative stuff you wanted to try. As I read through a few of the tab titles, I see it was this kind of creative.

Your bookmarks. Porn dots the list, and innocent folders labeled with ‘CASPA’ contain thousands of bookmarks of porn. Places ascribed such boring names that you figured no one would ever look through.

Your messages. You had multiple girls you texted while I was in Texas. You lied to them about your age and what you were doing when certain pictures were taken. And I knew those were not your friends.

I go through your laptop, the one you haven’t used since K built you that desktop computer as a gift. Google won’t even pull up at first; it wants to restore the tabs, and for some reason, I say yes. After thinking for a minute, it pulls up four windows, with at least thirty tabs of porn open in each window. I can’t even breathe. My skin feels hot, my heart rate gallops and my eyes swim with tears.

I cry for the person I thought you were, that you so clearly are not. I don’t want to see anymore, but I can’t stop searching. I don’t know who you are. The porn is a goddamn cancer- it’s in your bookmarks, it’s in your history, it’s saved on your computer, it’s in your twitter feed.

The secrecy is deafening, and I can’t handle it. I can’t consider your privacy; I can only think about how you violated our relationship and my trust. It had taken MONTHS for me to trust you when we were dating; clearly, I’d made the wrong choice, again.

We’d talked before many times about transparency and never wanting to hide something from the other person and communicating openly.

Guess I was talking to myself in that echo chamber.

I look through your phone while you’re in the shower; your favorite stars are hidden in a secret folder on your reminders app, your incognito tab is packed, your texts with friends banter back and forth about an actress’s scenes. You say, “I’d give up my license for her,” I guess you meant your marriage license.

I can't claim the moral high ground. I know I am absolutely guilty. Guilty for not trusting you and not letting it go, for finding the bad I was looking for, or as you would put it, snooping. But I cannot shake the fact that you never used to have anything to hide from me. You’d hand me your phone and let me get up to whatever I wanted because I didn’t have a smartphone at the time. You had no secrets.

Looking back now, I understand that was the cultivated image you wanted me to see. The one you wanted me to fall for. You’re not the man that I thought had integrity, who was the same person all the time. The person I thought I knew better than anyone in the world.

Who is this stranger I’m living with?

Mentally, I run right to the edge of the cliff without hesitation; maybe we should separate.

By now, I know myself well enough to know that I don’t mean it. My anger will torch and destroy everything with a well-placed Molotov cocktail before I’ve returned to reason. The only way I know how to prevent myself from imploding like a grenade is to get as far away from the situation as possible.

I get in my car with a roll of toilet paper, my journal and a water bottle and feverishly drive half an hour east to some park I’d never heard of, barely able to see through the tears.

At first, my emotions are unnamable. Can words exist for this pain? Instead, a black hole that sucks and threatens to pull me in, sits in their place.

To calm myself, I take a walk on one of the trails, blowing my nose every now and again with the wad of toilet paper stuffed in my coat pocket. After walking and blasting music for the space of a couple of hours, I return to my car, pull out my journal and try to talk myself back from the edge.

I ignore your texts and phone call because I can’t trust myself to not blow us both up.

This changes everything. Shards of memories assault me, cruel and cutting. With this new knowledge come to light, everything takes on a different hue.

Me, totally unassuming, walking into the bathroom in our studio apartment to find you holding your dick with your laptop open and then rushing us out for boba so I’d forget about it.

You not wearing your wedding ring because your fingers would swell in the Arizona heat and just how convenient that felt looking back now.

Our wedding night. Religious upbringing we’ve since abandoned ensured we were both virgins- at least in the literal sense. Me changing shyly into an ill fitting piece of red lingerie, given to me during a bachelorette party. You rolled a condom on, lubed up and shoved yourself into me, hoisting my legs onto your shoulders. It hurt so bad, my hymen not yet broken. No foreplay, no emotion. You rubbed me in the wrong spot too fast and grabbed me too hard. I used to wonder where on earth you got those moves and knew to do that. I used to think it was me; I was the reason our wedding night sucked. But it was the porn.

You telling me that you preferred me clean shaven because that’s what you found most attractive.

Studying for hours on end for a single community college chem class and somehow never getting to the end of your homework despite putting in four to five hours a day.

Continually throwing myself at you throughout the years, even when I wasn’t turned on, trying every move you asked, giving one-sided pleasure and getting a sense that I was not enough for you sexually.

All those times you’d lock yourself in your study, because PA school was so hard and you didn't want to be distracted. When I’d knock, you’d take too long to come and open the door, and be short-tempered with me for telling you that dinner was ready or giving you a hug and kiss of encouragement.

A plastic shopping bag you hung near your desk that always seemed to be full of tissues, no matter the time of year.

I hate you for leading a double life. I hate your dad for being so careless and wrapped up in his own desires that he would let his young son find something so insidious. I hate that something that has nothing to do with me could cause me so much anguish. I hate being made to feel like I’m not enough by the one person with whom I have trusted my naked soul.

I hate myself for automatically wanting to tie up this chapter by separating from you. Giving up on you. I hate that I don’t know the right answer. Should I put myself first? Free myself from this emotional chokehold and separate from you? Or should I be the selfless wife and stay?

I hate that I don’t know the end. When you say you want to quit binging porn, I hate that I no longer trust you, and can’t know with a certainty that you mean it. I hate that you wrecked my safe haven. I hate that living with my judgmental parents that gave me these trust issues feels like a safer option than staying here with you. And most of all, I hate that thinking about leaving you hurts just as much as thinking about staying with you.

I signed up for therapy as a hail Mary, but I don’t know how to heal; every week they pull the sutures out and let my wounds bleed afresh. They clean it and give me exercises of gauze so it doesn’t fester.

Until there some more advanced technology that cures this hurt, this ancient technique of bloodletting will have to do, I guess.

Love/Hate You,

SL