The Other Woman

1

Did you ever love me? Does it even matter anymore?

We created a kind of chaos and while I’ve waded through the wreckage to try and find a way through for the child we made, you’ve stayed behind to try and piece back together a life we destroyed.

Ours was not a love story for the ages. It was a lesson. A harsh and sharp lesson in the naivety of youth and the devastating cruelty of fate. We are the ultimate example of the pain that selfishness creates and the ultimate example of how lust can indeed be sinful.

When people would ask if we were sleeping together, you told them, ‘why would I eat the cheeseburger when I have steak at home.’ I told myself it was a cover. You were just trying to stave off the questions. The truth is you meant it. I was nothing compared to the woman you really loved. I was the guilty cheeseburger you wolf down from the takeout before you go home because you just can’t resist, even though you know it’s bad for you and the meal waiting for you at home, lovingly prepared is everything you really need. You shattered my self esteem and you laughed while you did it and so I laughed too, because what else was I worth? Little to you and nothing to myself.

I did love you. I don’t know why I did. You used to say that if you ripped into a woman, found those little flaws and made charming and yet hurtful comments, she was so often putty in your hands . Do you know why? Do you even understand what you’re actually doing to us? You’re lowering our self esteem on purpose so that we seek your positive attention. It’s not a good thing. It’s an awful thing. Yes it gets you laid, congratulations. It leaves us in tatters and questioning who and what we are. It doesn’t make you a hero amongst men because of the notches in your bedpost. Each notch you gained that way is a woman you destroyed for your own personal gain and sexual gratification. Is that really something to be proud of?

I don’t think that I’m innocent. Whether you deserved her or not she loved you and I took you from her when she needed you most. I knew what she was going through and I still did it. For my part in her pain I will always be sorry.

I’ve often wondered what you told her about us. I wonder if I was the evil temptress that bewitched you. It is after all a story that’s sufficed for as long as such betrayals have existed.

Do you remember how we met? I wasn’t even going to go to his house that day. I’d had such a long day at work and I just wanted to go home, but he told me it would be fun. I walked into his flat and there you were, frying up steak and talking one hundred miles a minute. I’d just left England and I found myself with the only English man in my small Irish town cooking me up a steak that might as well still have been mooing. You always say you didn’t flirt that day but you did. I maybe did too, though there was no instant attraction for either of us. You were with someone and so was I. I wasn’t your type and you weren’t mine. Not exactly a match made in heaven.

You looked much the same then as you do now. The same band t shirts and faded blue jeans. The same dorky blonde hair with the haircut that never suits. The same piercing blue eyes and idiotic smile that somehow manages to be inviting and ridiculous. You’re the same gamer hunched over his keyboard and screaming at the other players that you were that day, mouth half full of food. You were funny and I laughed. A little too polite and charming for an English man. How I managed to find you when I had one at home that I could barely tolerate at times will never cease to amaze me.

You had told me that you were a busker and over the coming weeks I passed you a few times and stopped to listen and to chat. Then, one afternoon on the way back to my desk job after lunch, as I walked towards you, you were singing of Chasing Cars and as I walked closer to you I began to sing. I’ll never forget that as you played, your jaw dropped and you shouted, ‘where the fuck did that come from?’ and you never missed a note on your guitar. I came to stand beside you and we sang. That’s when it started.

Quickly you went from casual acquaintance to best friend. I met your partner and you met mine. You and he were gamers, you fought playfully because he was a Southerner and you were a Northerner. Everything was normal. Who said a man and a woman can’t be best friends? I fell pregnant with his child, a son. On my breaks from work we sang together because that was your day job. You were an anti establishment, no bank account, no footprint that they could search you through anarchist and you made more than enough back then as the eccentric town busker.

I thought you were mad. You only drank from glass bottles and you complained about vaccinations and the aspartame in the diet cola I chugged back like a life source. You didn’t smoke or drink. You didn’t even eat chocolate, you’d given it up for New Years just to prove you could.

I brought you Cherry Bakewells from the Iceland across from your spot and you gave me the Malteasers the same old woman brought you every day. You wore multi-coloured gloves that one of your groupies gave you when it was cold and played and sang till your throat hurt and your fingers almost bled. We talked about conspiracy theories and we laughed at people that weren’t us. We knew everyone and before long, if someone was looking for you they came to me and vice versa. I saw you almost every day I worked.

You came to my son’s Christening when he was born even though you’re not a believer. You were growing your hair by then and had already started to resemble Jesus at the last supper, but you scrubbed up well in your blue shirt and your tie, I think I told you that. It was the first time I realised I was attracted to you. As my partner stood next to me at the baptismal font, my eyes strayed to you only to find you staring back at me. How odd that our sin came to life in the house of a God you don’t believe in.

There was no instantaneous change. It was so gradual that I really believe we were already in it before we realised we were past the point of no return.

My son was baptised in April and by November I was working somewhere new. In a shop this time. I was back at college and you were working in a bar that I didn’t even know existed. One night after work, my partner texted to say our son was already asleep and to tell me I didn’t need to rush home. I text you and we decided to go for a drink when you finished your shift. We were only going for one but it was 1am before we finally stumbled out, laughing, onto the street. We didn’t even know we had so much to talk about. We ate chips we didn’t want and you tripped over your own feet in the steel toe caps you only took off to sleep.

So it went on and before the New Year bells came in and you sat down to have your first taste of chocolate in 365 days, I had become the other woman.

It wasn’t love then. Not even close. We swore that there would never be love. This was just an added extra to our friendship. My partner knew. He had always known. An open relationship we called it, but really it was just a way for us to ignore our own problems. Yours did not, but I told myself that because it was just sex and there was no love, we weren’t doing anything wrong and she couldn’t get hurt.

She gave birth. I met your mother at the hospital. When you said my name she hugged me and said, ‘ah the famous best friend.’ There was something knowing in the way she looked at me.

I took your daughter in my arms and I to my horror, I saw that she was a fairy child, not long for this world and already being called to the next. The side of me still left that believed in such things, that was brought up in some of the old ways of this Island, recognised the feeling and recognised her face.

I was the second person you called when your daughter died.

‘She’s gone,’ you said, throat sore and dry and lonely.

When the call ended, I collapsed onto my stairs and screamed silently as tears for a child that wasn’t mine streamed down my face.

Your mother phoned me next on her way to the airport, ‘ can you get to him?’ Of course I could.

You came outside as I arrived and you collapsed onto me. Every bit of grief pouring out of you. I held you as tightly as I would my child and in the moment, I realised, there was love. Your mother had known it before we did.

I held your mother at the funeral and I put you in a taxi home when it was all over and you’d drank far too much.

After that when we could be together, we were. I walked you through every step of your pain and I felt it with you. I lived inside your grief and you took shelter in my love and I let you, when I should have sent you home.

It was March before we said I love you. I remember because it was the weekend before St Patrick’s Day and you were always so smug about the fact you got me to say it first. You were working in the bar and I was there. I often went alone. I talked to all the regulars and the owner knew me by now. If she knew what went on between us she didn’t say. I was talking to a group of men and you shot daggers across the room. I slipped away to sit with you and I asked you what was wrong.

‘You’re mine,’ you told me.

‘If you talk like that, it might be dangerous. We might develop feelings,’’ I teased, attempting to hide the shock at words he was never meant to say.

You leaned across the bar and smiled sadly.

‘You say that as if I haven’t already.’

We locked up the bar together and as we kissed where the camera couldn’t see you broke away but still held me close and said, ‘tell me you love me.’

And with those words I realised that I did.

‘I love you.’

By June it was over. I fell asleep on my sofa in the middle of the day and woke to two messages. One from you saying, ‘she knows.’ And one from her calling me all the things I deserved and telling me to stay away. You cut all contact and that was that. The guilt had overrun you. Just as I had said it would not two weeks before, when I saw the pain in your eyes.

2

My friends and I took bets on how long it would be before you came back. I won, almost to the day. It was four months. You called just after my birthday one night so late it was early. It was freezing cold that October, even more so than usual. I snuck outside to sit in the car with a blanket wrapped around me and when I spoke I saw my breath, but I stayed out there talking with you almost till dawn while you promised that you loved me and we promised that we would get it right in the next life. You said that you had heard when we die, we get to live our lives again and we have the option to make different choices, you said if it was true you would choose me. You just couldn’t leave her right now after everything you had both been through. We cried and we laughed and we sang. We parted ways as friends.

I thought that would be the last of us. I had remained in my unhappy relationship because, for my sins, I loved him too and you and I had never planned on leaving them. I took his abuse because I thought I deserved it.

I worked in the bar you had left behind and they told you I was always there on Wednesday nights. I was late to arrive one night and I was told you had been looking for me. I found you later in our favourite area of our favourite bar and when you saw me you didn’t even give me a chance to speak. You wrapped me in your arms like nothing had changed. Then you told me you were still so unhappy and she was pregnant again.

We talked all night. We went to 'our spot' where we always found ourselves after everything had closed and we couldn’t let the night end and we kept on talking. You said you loved me and you kissed me, but this kiss was so different from every other. There was emotion in it that hadn’t been there before, a longing that I didn’t recognise.

When I got in the taxi to leave you came running back, calling my name and I stepped out again only to find myself back in your arms.

We began anew.

This time was different. Something had changed in you, a bitterness and hardness had grown in our months apart. You professed your love more than ever but you kept me at more of a distance than you ever had. You would say strange things about the way I looked or dressed, mean things wrapped up in smiles I didn’t recognise. You had always been playful but this was different. This felt like an odd power trip you were on to try and control everything around you, including me. You had always been odd, you had told me the difference between men and women who had sex was as simple as the shitty lock and the master key, 'a key that opens many locks is a master key, but the lock opened by many keys was a shitty lock.' I had always known there was the hint of the misogynist about you but now, you seemed more married to that way of thinking than ever.

You grilled me about our time apart. You were desperate to know if there had been other men. There hadn’t. Some had tried and I had considered them, but they weren’t you. Though you seemed relieved, you needed to hear it again and again. Strangeness moved between us and there was a chilly wind that blew from your lips in my direction now.

I asked you if there had been other women and though you said no, to me it suddenly seemed an easy lie.

We went on a trip to the city for the day, because I complained I never saw you in the daylight. I got on the train and before I’d even sat down across from you I could see the shame on your face. I had refused for the first time to come and meet you and you’d been with another. The worst of it was I wasn’t surprised. I swallowed the pain. I realised I wasn’t special. I was the other woman. I was dispensable.

It was April again, the third I’d known you and the second I had loved you. You came to my mother’s house when I was supposed to be working and you told me you had to end it. She was pregnant. You couldn’t take the guilt anymore. It was a horrible day. You left and I cried and you asked me not to make you feel worse.

He asked me to marry him again after that. I said yes. We booked the closest date we could and I told you. You said you didn’t want me to get married and I said I needed to leave you behind because this was starting to destroy me.

The last week in April I ventured out with the obligatory banner around my neck proclaiming me a bride. No one could understand why I barely talked about the wedding and desired nothing more than for it to already be over. I was trying to forget you with a man who didn’t really know how to love me either, at least not without violence. You were there, in our favourite bar and acting as you always had, cooler than ice. You approached me with this fierce anger in your eyes as if seeing me there with that fake veil and silly banner, made you realise the reality of what was about to happen.

It was my Hen Night. A boy we both knew kissed me on the lips. You’ve always insisted that it was more than it was, more than the childish peck for a boy still a teenager, because to you, it seemed like more. Before he had even finished hugging me you were between us and you had a fight in your eyes.

‘Get away from her,’ you snapped through gritted teeth as if you were in pain.

He did and you pulled me into dark corners and then the kissing came, desperate and clinging on both sides. The hurricane began to turn again and this night, it would be irreversible.

I was with you the night before I married him. I convinced a friend to drive me to the place where you worked at 3am when you had your break. We sat against a huge oak tree and we held each other. I told you if you wanted me then I would abandon it all and we could walk away from this together. Looking back I think we both knew there was some safety net beneath my words. I never would have expected you to leave her and despite what he had done, I had always intended to marry him. I loved two men and you loved two women. Though neither of us could claim to love either, in any healthy way.

3

It was June. I knew I was pregnant and I knew beyond doubt that she was yours. I told my brand new husband. He decided to stay. Perhaps he thought after everything he had done to me, the bruises and scars he had left, he owed me this.

I made you a bacon sandwich and you sat in my kitchen in relative silence as I told you. You didn’t know, but it had been three years to the day since you had made me steak.

You were with me the night before your second child was born and I was four months pregnant with your third. You slipped into my bed at midnight. I left the door unlocked for you and in you came, smiling and smelling of disaronno. At the time, it felt like one of the longest nights of my life. She phoned you and you answered. You said you were at a house party. I felt my own guilt twist and turn in my stomach and yet when you began to dress I didn’t want you to go.

Later that day you sent me a picture of your new-born daughter. She looked so fragile, so like her sister. I saw disaster in her porcelain face.

Fifteen days later, as I crossed the train tracks, my phone began to ring. Your name flashed across my screen and my stomach sank. I clasped a hand to our unborn child as I answered.

‘It happened again,’ was all you could manage to choke out.

After that there was a radio silence. I sent message after message as I clutched my stomach, terrified.

I found out much later you were making deals, as I prayed for your child and for ours, you willed mine away. You prayed to my God and swore you would never see me again and would abandon the child that grew inside me if he would only let this one live.

It was the first thing I never forgave you for. Neither of us had our prayers answered.

Some rare genetic pairing meant that your daughters were not destined to live. Something they hadn’t found the first time and couldn’t prevent the second time.

The day of the funeral came. You called me from our favourite bar after nine. She had gone home. You were still there with your father. I went to you. I walked in and it was like you had given up trying to hide at all. Just like the last time you collapsed in my arms but this time you pulled up sharply and caressed my stomach. People looked and I tried to push your hands away.

‘Here she is,’ you slurred. ‘The woman I love who I am 80% sure is carrying my child.’

Your father managed to quiet you but you still took every opportunity you could find to touch me and pull at me as if I was some kind of life raft.

You ranted and raved that night worse than ever before. At some point you disappeared into a crowd and when it parted you were standing there kissing some other girl as I looked on, hot tears streaming from my eyes. You caught sight of me as I fled for the door and gave chase, capturing my arm in the street, hugging me tight to your chest as I fought to get away. I had to forgive you, you insisted. I had to because your head was in pieces and your heart was in the ground inside two smaller than you knew they made coffins. You didn’t even know how it happened and she was a stranger. I was our songs, our spot, our bar, our memories. I folded.

The three of us walked and talked all night until I was so tired I could barely stand. I could see how broken you were and I wanted to save you, but I didn’t know how. I watched you spiral into what anyone would call insanity and I felt myself fall over the cliff with you.

You became suffocating. If I didn’t meet you when you wanted you were cold and unfeeling and then when I was with you, you were loving and tender. My head spun and I couldn’t keep up with the spiral you were on.

Four weeks after the funeral, I found myself in my boss’ car heading to the emergency psychiatric unit at A&E. I was crushed by the weight of what was happening. My son’s Autism becoming ever more apparent and my husband’s inability to manage it, the realisation that the daughter growing inside me might not survive more than a week or so outside of the safety of my womb, the pain I suffered at the hands of the man I was married to, the guilt for what I had done to the innocent woman who lay patiently in bed waiting for you at night, my past repeating itself over and over in these cycles of abuse with men who never seemed to care about anything but themselves and the horror of it all made me feel like I was drowning.

I had lost my way and I had lost it in you. I was being pounded by waves of my own making and that others had made for me. I was caught between two men, both who professed love and both who brought me suffering.

I was in so much turmoil and I was still propping you up every day and trying to love you and it was clear to me you didn’t care anymore. I told myself that you had a legitimate excuse. You didn’t need to know how bad it was for me after everything you’ve been through. This was one of my first lessons in a way of life I have brought with me ever since. Just because someone has been through hell, doesn’t give them an excuse to drag you down into the pits with them.

The night I ended it was in October, just after my 23rd birthday. You called me and I came but I felt different and so did you. You had lost two children and I was raising one and carrying another. You had forgotten I was still a mother. You would call and expect me to drop my life and become yours.

We sat at our favourite spot in our favourite bar and you drank pink gin. I told you I couldn’t do this anymore, that living in this in between life was tearing whatever life I managed to build into pieces. You told me to find you a replacement because if you couldn’t have sex with me you needed someone else. I’ll never know how I managed to control the stabbing ache in my heart. I watched your attempts to make me jealous and I felt my heart harden towards you for the first time. I left you at our table.

You found someone of course. Someone new to love you and make you feel, if only for a moment. I’ve often wondered if you told her the same things you told me. You were already losing your grip on what was real. Your emotions becoming twisted up in your grief and what a crushing grief it was.

4

I gave birth to our daughter in January. For your part you had been a point of stress and tension during my pregnancy. Consultants were in overdrive over the potential risk to the child I carried given the fate of her siblings. You were so determined to hide it from the woman you still shared a bed with even while you had already found a second bed to share to replace mine, that you missed appointments and made excuses even when though I needed you. You accused me of being cold with you when you did come, as if you couldn't understand that by now I didn’t care if she found out, I just wanted to save my own child.

You came to the hospital when she was born. Once you knew she was yours, you were always there, even when my husband was. You brought her too. It was one of the most horrible things I had ever witnessed. A ghost of a woman I had loved, called friend and betrayed in the most intimate way possible, stepped into my hospital room and was confronted with the child we conceived while hers was already growing inside her. You asked her if she wanted to hold our daughter and she ran. You didn’t move. You sat on my bed and looked at me, pleading with me with your spirit to fix this for you, to make everything better. I went after her. She was sitting in the lobby and trying with fingers that shook with emotions I will never understand and I helped to create, to roll a cigarette. I took it from her and she let me. Why wouldn’t she? I had already taken everything else. I rolled it for her and I walked her outside. I stood with her in the cold and I said I was sorry even though I knew that could fix nothing. She confided in me even then and I consoled her, or at least I tried. I told her if she wanted to make this work with you then I would find a way to make it work too even though I didn’t believe it. I lied to her again, standing there in the cold. I told her it was over, that you were different and the lies tasted like sulphur and gasoline in my dishonest mouth.

By April, we were living together. My marriage was over and so was your relationship.

How could we ever make it work? The people we had each fallen in love with were gone. My best friend, replaced with a stranger I didn’t know and yours with a woman you didn’t understand half as well as you thought. There were glimpses of our former selves, but they were only glimpses.

I needed more from you than you knew how to give and I wasn’t built to be the woman you wanted. I became a simpering child, desperate for any scrap of decency from you. So much so that I rejoiced when you decided to stay home one single, solitary Friday night because I needed you, rather than find your way to the bar. Your joy was in the mechanical device you couldn’t pull yourself away from where you could play the hero, in the bottom of an empty bottle of gin.

My unhappiness was an open wound and you knew how deep it was, yet when the last nail was driven into the coffin of our time together, you still seemed so surprised. I had been yours even when the wedding ring that bound me to another bit into a finger that didn’t fully understand why it was there. How could I have found a way to break free of what we had?

I simply realised, that I had always been the other woman and I still was. You never truly wanted me. You wanted to possess me. You wanted to hide me in the corner of your real life with, as you once told me, the sweet and uncomplicated woman that you asked the universe for. You never expected it to put me in your path. I was the wildness in the shadows that you had kept one foot inside. The ferocity under your skin that bubbled just beneath the surface, heard my song and felt it’s way to me, but I wasn’t really what you wanted. When you had her you wanted me, but not at the expense of what you had with her and when you had me, you longed for the safety of her embrace. There was too much in me that screamed and too little that knew how to let you live outside of reality. There still is. I lived in the shadow of the woman that you truly considered the mother of your children. The irony of that, will take some time to wear thin. I was the other woman because I couldn’t be her and she couldn’t be me. I was the other woman because I could never hope to mean as much to you as you meant to yourself.

5

At least once every few months now and every day in the first days since you left my home, we have asked ourselves, ‘How did we get here?’

This is how we got here.

You blow through the lives of women like a hurricane and you are blind to the destruction you leave so carelessly in your wake. You slide in and out of our homes, our hearts, our minds as if our existence should be defined by your presence. I am quite sure you don’t see it that way, but I lived it.

I am not the hero in this story. There is no hero, only villains who tried to convince the world that their crime was less than the others and the woman we wronged. I expect no sympathy and I deserve none. My story does however stand as a warning for any woman staring down the path marked, 'other.' I am more than what the men that have claimed to love me, attempted to reduce me to. I am worth more than a make believe romance based on betrayal.

I am the Master of my fate and I am the other woman, in no one's life.