Acute Pain.
Do I want to go there? No, but I’m going anyway. Call me sadomasochist. How can I heal if I refuse to look at the pain? I choose to look at it today. I know it’s going to hurt.
It all started the day I found a document. You had left it on the kitchen table for me to find. We were married already. We had promised to be true and honest to each other. Perhaps this was your attempt at being truthful.
I saw the folded document on the table, picked it up and looked at it. I started reading and as my eyes moved down across the page, my heart sank. I could hardly believe it. My thoughts were transported back in time to the previous months, the previous years. You had been playing me all this time!
I walked to you and handed you the document. You were pale and frightened. I looked you in the eyes and asked you: “Why did you do it?” You said you were sorry, tried to explain and started crying. I just stood there and listened to you. I don’t know what my exact thoughts were at that moment. I was confused.
It took me several days to pick up the pieces of my heart from the floor, reassemble them, find my brain and reconnect it, attempt to start thinking straight again and find a solution. Eventually I did find one. It cost me a lot, but you were my wife after all and my job was to forgive you and help you, not condemn you. I was a good Christian boy. It took three and a half years to repair the damage that you had caused. I was confident that you had learned something from this experience, that it would never happen again, and that our relationship would be strengthened in the process.
You promised to never do it again, I remember. But you did it again, the exact same thing at the exact same place. I was baffled. I couldn’t believe it. But I was patient, I sat with you and asked you to explain. Your eyes became watery and you said it was because of the place: “When I go there, I don’t know what happens but I lose my mind.” I understood, and we agreed to never to go to that place again.
I thought the matter was resolved. But then, you did it again in secret. We were not at that place and I was not with you and you did it deliberately and tried to hide it, but I found out. I questioned you and this time you were a bit more defensive and said that you were not perfect, that you could not control yourself, that we needed to put in place some kind of strategy to help you. So I worked up a plan. It took me many hours of work. I showed it to you and you agreed to go with that plan.
I thought the matter was finally settled but as the months and years went by, I noticed that you were not following the plan. You were twisting it every way you could in order to gain hidden benefits, all the while pretending that the plan was brilliant and working. It was not working. You were cheating. I decided to check everything you had done in the previous two years and realized, to my horror, that you had found a way to fool me using the plan.
At that point I cried. I realized that this was no weakness of yours, it was intentional manipulation. You had this secret agenda to trick me since the beginning and your crying and apologizing were part of it. I was devastated. I started questioning my own sanity. I started hating myself for being so naïve and forgiving. I should have left you the first time, before we had children. Now I was more stuck than ever. There was no way you would ever change and there was no way that I could ever trust you again.
There is a name for what you are doing. I learned it this week. It’s called Domestic Theft. My soulmate is a thief and nothing can be proven since we are in a financial partnership called marriage.
Metamorphosis 