Super Sonic   +  UnFunny Files

Adulteress

This is the only post from Before that I've been very tempted not to publish. But... if I'm going to be honest about life After, I may as well be honest about the Before as well.

I wrote this back in November. Tony read it, we discussed fidelity and love and unfinished business and all that stuff and blah blah blah I miss him. Whatever. He was OK with it. Judge me if you dare.

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If this makes you uncomfortable, please know that it just may be fiction.
Or, maybe not.


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Rejection is rejection, whether we call it divorce, puppy love, or adolescent turmoil.
Have you thought about how this relationship will end?
Judy Blume, 'Forever'.

I've never cheated on my husband.

But I have been sorely tempted.

There are people, sometimes, from our past, who feel like an experience we have not had.

Unfinished business.

Half a whisper of a sweet nothing, stilted by the dead of night.

And if these people, these karma cards in your deck of life, resurface at a moment, so perfectly inopportune, you could not have scripted it? Can you call it fate, when it so clearly wasn't meant to be?

Adulteress.

No one likes that word. It's a word that conjures scarlet letters, flames and pitchforks, red robes in castle tunnels flickered with candlelight.

Adulteress.

It sits, acidic, on my tongue.

There is so much distance between the comfortable, well worn love of a marriage, and the tingling, icy butterflies of a first kiss. Or a second.

In the end, is it worth it? To feel like this? To feel young and unencumbered and silly and dangerous and have the taste of wine on my lips?

What happens tomorrow? Whatever it is, it can't be good.

An infatuation that rusts and rots against the trust I have with my husband, that sears and scalds the love between us.

A dissatisfaction, with life as it is. A feeling that this is not enough, this day to day-ness cannot compare to the exhilaration of something new, the intoxication of something I have not felt for so long.

Would I want to leave? Would I even entertain that thought, breaking my childrens hearts, tearing their stability away?

And if I did, would I remember just in time; that everything tarnishes, that you can only wear party shoes for so long before your slippers start to look very comfortable again?

A kaleidoscope of thoughts. Destiny trendling out in two different directions, then slipping and knotting back on itself.

The possibilities, that exist, in the space of time between him asking "Can I have your number?", and my replying that if he needed me, he could contact my husband at work.

A loaded question. A loaded answer. A existential crisis of fidelity, loaded into that pause as he looks into my eyes and reminds me of all the things we did not do, all the things we could have had.

Unfinished business.

There was so much more to it than that. A whole other story. Isn't there always more to it, than what we blog for the world to see?

I almost wish I could say my heart was broken, but that's not true. My heart was never in it, so how could it be broken...?

I walked away.

That's all any of us need to know.

And most of the time, I am sure I did the right thing.

It's only late at night, when loneliness curls around me, my husband snoring beside me, that I wonder.