– My apologies in advance for what’s going to be a long, emotional post. However, at the moment, writing this seems to be the only thing keeping me the least bit sane, so I ask that you please bear with me. –
I had to pay the full $14.95 renewal rate yesterday. I guess that’s the kind of thing that happens when you forget to check your email for a few days because your wife left you for another, also married, woman.
I mean, I guess I always knew our marriage was strained from my severe depression, but I never expected anything like this. It’s been three days since she told me, and I’m still reeling.
I haven’t eaten and have barely slept. I’ve been sitting here, drinking soda, smoking cigarettes, and slowly going crazy staring at the walls all that time. Periodically, I’ll get up to vomit my soda into the sink. I can barely concentrate - not that anything would feel interesting if I could. The song I couldn’t stop hitting the repeat button on four days ago (“Rainbow Blues” by Jethro Tull) sounds like shit now. So does every other song.
Almost overwhelming feelings tell me to quit prolonging the misery and just give up, but I know I can’t do that. I sort of feel like if I went and hanged myself next week, some deity would pop up and show me how my future would have been if I hadn’t done the deed. Naturally, it would involve me becoming happy, satisfied, and successful a few short months later. Then the deity would go “HA-Ha!” like Nelson Muntz and reincarnate me as a dung beetle or something.
God, this rotten disease has taken everything from me. I work fast food because my social skills degraded so much that I couldn’t survive a job interview in the IT industry. I lost my friends because I always felt so nervous and awkward around them - eventually my wife was the only person I felt comfortable talking to. I lost interest in everything; things I used to be able to read about for hours ended up feeling like Accounting classes with monotonal teachers.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. She was the only goddamn thing I had left. Now everything is gone. Two marriages are dead. Three children (not ours) are going to go from having a mommy and daddy, to two mommies, in the blink of an eye.
We were together nearly eight years, married for six and a half. Apparently what we had was no longer even strong enough to withstand a six-week friendship that blossomed to romance and declarations of love less than two weeks ago. GODDAMN DEPRESSION!
This still doesn’t seem real. It’s like somebody took an X-Acto knife to my brain’s motherboard, slashing copper traces to keep all these horrible signals from passing through. I wish they made emotional conductive ink pens. Or maybe I don’t.
The worst part of the whole situation (a phrase I use to describe nearly every part of the situation) is that I have an aching desire for hugs given by friends with cheap shirts that I can ruin with tears. Unfortunately, the only person I’ve ever (including my grandma) felt comfortable hugging is my wife, and she’s the reason I feel like this. Quite the predicament.
To her credit, she’s been (mostly) staying with me, comforting me, and accepting my emotional outbursts with relative grace and understanding. She’s done a lot of crying, herself. Her head hangs, and when she looks up, it’s hard not to see the pain in her eyes. She tells me that she’s been enabling my depression for too long, and that this is the kick in the ass I need to get into therapy (after unsuccessfully trying a laundry list of anti-depressant drugs over the years). I don’t know. The other woman just makes everything so much worse.
Perhaps it sounds strange to want to have the person who ripped your heart out and stomped on it around to console you during the hellish aftermath, but I guess it’s one of those things that’s not easy (or possible) to explain completely. She is, by far, the best friend I’ve ever had, and I can understand her position in the matter; I was dragging her down so much that she just couldn’t take it anymore.
I’ll probably end up moving back with my family, halfway across the country in Pennsylvania, so these are likely among the last times I’ll ever see her again. I want as many of those times as I can get.
This is so fucking hard.
God, I’ll miss you, Farrah.
