Suddenly Single

Technically I'm still married. I guess I'm considered separated now. That's what my profile on Facebook says.

It's amazing how intensely you can feel anger and love for someone at the same time!

Hoon's been gone since July 1st this year (2019) and I just realized that we first met four years ago today, 9/11/2015. All the sudden my stomach feels like I swallowed a bag of rocks...

It was the evening of September 11th, 2015. I met Hoon at a Chili's after work. As I walked up to him standing outside the entrance, I could see the fear and awe in his eyes and it unsettled me. But he seemed handsome and kind and so I smiled and followed him into the restaurant. I was so hungry for affection that halfway through our molten lava cake I was holding his hand, our arms spread across the table and our eyes locked in wonder.

'Will he be the one to save me from my loneliness and how am I even thinking this so soon?'

That was a Friday. Saturday night he came over to my place and then Sunday we spent the day together in Frisco, Colorado. It was magical and I was already taken by him, hook, line, and sinker.

I remember he took so many pictures of me. He made me feel like the most beautiful woman on earth.

Since then our relationship has been anything but typical. It's been full of secrets, financial instability, immigration woes, and cultural differences. But it's also been filled with passion, fun, and so many new experiences that I wouldn't trade for anything! I am still deeply in love with my husband, in spite of him abandoning me the way he did.

The way he left has me baffled and it hurts the most out of everything. There was no warning and he didn't even take half his stuff. He snuck off like a captive in the night. Here's how it went down:

Monday afternoon around 3 PM 7/1/19, my daughter brings in Hoon's van key and tells me it was laying on the ground like someone had tossed it over the fence. I thought this was pretty odd but Hoon can be odd so I chalked it up to him being in a hurry and needing to ride with a coworker or something.

By 10 PM that night he still wasn't home from work and he hadn't responded to any of my texts or calls. Again, this was somewhat odd but not altogether unlike my husband. I went to sleep expecting him to crawl into bed around midnight or 2 AM. He never did. I checked his office to see if he slept in there so he wouldn't wake me but there was no sign of him and his van was still in the driveway.

At this point I became panicky and started frantically calling his friends, hospitals, and I even called an ICE detention center in case he had been picked up by mistake. I wanted to call his boss but when I looked up the number in my phone the name was all that was left of his contact information. I can only assume that Hoon deleted the rest and left his bosses name so I wouldn't notice. I looked up his bosses information on line and came up with a home address so I went there and camped out for a while until I finally got word that the last time his boss saw Hoon was on the Saturday before.

Finally, that night I came to my senses and checked his office again. There was a letter on his desk that I overlooked that morning because it was written in Hangul, the Korean form of writing. I can read a little Hangul but not enough to translate his bad handwriting. I ended up having to reach out to one of Hoon's Korean friends. I would have been mortified to do this if I wasn't so worried about what the letter said.

She translated the letter, line by line, in the most caring way possible. I wept as I read about how Hoon felt he had failed me and didn't want to make me cry anymore. He said he left me because he loves me but that he wants me to never forgive him for leaving and for all the pain he'd caused me throughout our relationship. He said he would be punished with shame for the rest of his life.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK!?!?!

All the tears he made me cry were because I was terrified he would be deported. And I felt it was horribly unfair that he wasn't issued a temporary visa or something while we waited through the endless deportation proceedings! I cried because I loved him. I cried because I felt he was being treated so unfairly. Not one tear was shed because I ever thought he failed me!

My heart hurts too much for me to continue but I hope to pick up where I've left off. There is so much more I want to share.