Love, Lunaé

The weeks that followed were an emotional roller coaster. I wanted to forget. I wanted everything wiped from my memory because somehow even the memories that had nothing to do with the affair felt soiled by it. I felt like a shell of the woman I had been before I knew. And yet, there was something painfully familiar about that feeling. I had spent so much of my life trying to be enough. Trying to be better. Trying to matter. I had given everything I knew how to give, and somehow I had still found myself standing in the same place, asking the same question.

Where was I? That question became an obsession. Where was I when you were talking to her? Where was I when you drove her home in my car? Where was I when you went to her bed? I wasn’t asking in the physical sense. I knew where I was. I was home waiting for you. I wanted to know where I was in your mind. Did I exist there at all? Did you think about me? Did you have to push me out of your thoughts to do what you were doing? Or, for those few hours, was I simply gone?

I asked question after question knowing damn well that I didn’t want the answers. Every answer had the potential to hurt me, and many of them did. Then I would become angry with myself for hurting. I would wake up crying in the middle of the night and get pissed off that I was crying again. Not because I didn’t think I had the right to grieve, but because I wanted to be over it. I wanted my mind back. Instead, every day it found another version of the same question. Where was I?

For a while I wondered if I kept asking because some part of me believed I deserved the pain. I don’t think that was it anymore. I think I was looking for proof. I remember the first day he had to go back to work. He had offered to find another job, but we needed steady income. I was terrified when he left, but not for the reason someone might assume. It wasn’t really about her. I needed to know that when I wasn’t standing in front of him, I still existed. For years, I thought I knew exactly who my husband was when I wasn’t looking. Other people reinforced it constantly. “That man adores you.” “He puts you on a pedestal.” I believed them because I had believed it myself. Now I was trying to reconcile that man with the man who had cheated on me. I remember thinking that maybe the pedestal had simply been too high for him to remember that was where he had last placed me.

I wanted to be angry. Some days I was. Anger was easy. Anger gave me something solid to hold onto. It was much easier to be furious than to admit how badly I needed reassurance that I had mattered in the moments when his actions suggested that I hadn’t. I would try to occupy my mind, and then another thought would creep in. Did he finish? It sounds almost absurd when reduced to the question itself, but even that wasn’t really about sex. If he couldn’t perform, maybe he felt guilty. If he felt guilty, he had thought about me. And if he had thought about me, then I had been there. So I asked. Then I dissected the answers.

I tore apart every image my mind could create, looking for some tiny piece of evidence that I had existed in that room without ever being there. I was stress testing every possible version of what happened. Did you think about me here? What about here? What about then? Was there any moment when you remembered us? Because if I could find myself somewhere inside the worst thing he had ever done to me, maybe I could convince myself that he had never stopped loving me.

And I desperately needed to know that because I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay. Not because ten years together meant I owed him an eleventh. Not because what he did was acceptable. Not because leaving frightened me more than staying. I stayed because even through my anger, I could still see the man I loved standing in front of me. I could hate what he had done and still understand that the worst thing he had ever done was not necessarily the entirety of who he was. I also knew that staying could not mean returning to what we had been before.

There had been too much sacrifice. Too much resentment. Too many years of both of us allowing things to become normal simply because they were familiar. Somewhere along the way, we had both become versions of ourselves that weren’t working anymore. I didn’t want that marriage back.

If I was going to forgive him, forgiveness could not mean pretending it hadn’t happened. It had to mean allowing him the opportunity to become better because of it. And he would have to earn that opportunity. We talked about boundaries. We talked about what we expected from each other and what needed to change in both of us.

For a while, I searched his phone regularly. I needed reassurance, but I hated needing it.

He offered to change phones, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to become his jailer. I didn’t want a marriage that survived only because I had developed a better surveillance system. That wasn’t the woman I wanted to become, and it wasn’t the kind of wife I wanted to be. I set up an alert that told me when he arrived at work and when he left. For then, that was enough. If he had any contact with her, he told me himself so I would never have to hear it from someone else. When boundaries at work were tested, he followed up with his superiors and documented what had happened and what had been agreed upon.

Most importantly, he answered my questions. Even the ugly ones. Even the ones I sometimes wished afterward I had never asked. Some of his answers hurt like hell, but strangely, that made me trust them more. He wasn’t giving me the version designed to make me feel better. He was giving me answers I could decide what to do with. That mattered. Because forgiveness was mine to give. Trust was his to rebuild. And those were not the same thing. Little by little, something began changing.

Every time she attempted to interact with him, she was met with refusal. Every time I searched his phone, I found nothing contradicting what I had been told. Every question I asked was met with the same transparency. Eventually, I ran out of crime scenes to reconstruct. I had imagined every possible version. Asked every painful variation of the same question. Examined every answer from every angle. And somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t asking anymore. The pain hadn’t magically disappeared. I simply no longer needed to keep reopening the wound to prove that I had existed inside it. I knew where I had been. And more importantly, I was beginning to understand where I was now. I was still here. Not because I had been too weak to leave. Not because ten years obligated me to sacrifice another ten.

I was here because I had made a decision with my eyes open. I had seen what he was capable of at his worst, and I was watching what he chose to do afterward. For the first time since everything happened, I started reaching for my husband instead of pulling away from him. I felt lighter. We weren’t going backward. I didn’t want to. We were trying to find something different. Something more honest than what had existed before. For weeks I had been asking, Where was I?

Eventually, I realized I had been so consumed with finding myself inside his betrayal that I had stopped looking for myself anywhere else. Maybe that was the question I needed to be asking all along. Not where was I when he betrayed me. But where am I now? And who do I want to be from here?