Being Cheated.

It's been a while. Like I don't know where to start, I'm hesitating with my trembling fingers while I attempt to sort out the words I think I want to type down about all of this. A whole year that passed by, coming with its ups and downs and making me see that there was life after hurt, and that that life could be wonderful. Almost surreal. Like in my life I could deserve any actual, substantial happiness.

Just once I thought, instead of that glimpse into the "could-be-yours", I was going to reach out and grasp it tightly in my hands. I know I am not perfect. I know I did things that I regret because I am a human, I am a woman, and my thoughts are governed by my emotions. What I thought may have been best for a minute was not actually best in the long run... or what I thought was actually real was just a cheap illusion of happiness. Again.

I didn't know you very well in the beginning... there was something about you that intrigues me. I thought there was more to you than the surface of messy brown hair and dark brown eyes. More than the scars on your arm or the mask you put up to hide the reasons you made those scars. I wanted to be inside that jumble of human soul, I wanted, for the first time in a long time, to be human enough to be in love. And you were it. I knew it. That kiss and those butterflies and that reckless abandon in which I allowed myself to drown.

How could it happen, a chance meeting with a stranger, would throw me into this path of young mother and heartbroken lover. Two weeks, that was it, and you were hooked on me. It was like we had been together years in those days, and I was so afraid. I couldn't let another man in, I couldn't feel the ripping in my chest that I feel now as I write this... not again. I ended it. And yet some cosmic force kept us twined together... like it knew that there was something of yours inside my belly long before either of us did...

An accident and a blessing, a stomach growing every day... much like the love and the hard times and the worry and the anxiety. And more than anything the beautiful chaos. I got to know things about you... your family and your past, how Emily Allen broke your heart for three years and you carved her initials in your arm. The way you turn subtitles on movies and are so self conscious of your curly hair.

We became family, pregnant and grump and dysfunctional family but we had a routine. I would get scared or hurt, and I would dump you. And eventually, be it two hours or a couple of days, I was begging for you to come back because I missed everything about you, even your obnoxious honesty. And then, as Christmas rounded the corner and our families had come to know each of us and accept us... you pulled out that ring.

That one I had said I liked so much from Fred Myer, that you had secretly been saving up for so that you could get down on one knee in the middle of the night, me pregnant and in your t-shirt sitting on a bar stool in our bathroom wondering what you were so nervous about, and propose marriage. Ask me to be yours forever. Profess that you loved me truly and honestly...

But what is honesty anyways? I mean, I expect you felt it in that moment, and thought you wanted it for us, to raise Noah together in that white picket fence life we never had as kids... but where was the effort? Noah was born and it was like he took everything I loved in you and drained you of everything you used to be.

Instead of that brilliant, stimulating man I waited on every night and loved to be seen with, you were a shell. Living a lie. I dont know why. I dont know if it was me or if it was something else, the pressure of being a full time parent or the expectations or the face that I got so caught up in being a mother I neglected your needs and forgot that I was supposed to be the one you could lean on... But you stopped.

Stopped coming home, stopped saying that you loved me out loud. Pretty soon you werent even there. You were gone even when you were laying next to me in bed. I felt alone, like all the love we built was drained and we were just playing house... badly. All I wanted was to dump you like i did in the beginning so we could both realise how badly we actually needed and wanted to be together... that was how it always used to go. I thought I would tell you to go, and you would, and then I would call you crying and you would come running back and we would be perfect, we would fix our problems and get married in august... be a halmark family. But that was not how it went this time.

This time you met her. This time you really took the break as the end, as a release from the bonds of adult life and the girl you thought you maybe loved once upon a time and then impregnated. Oops. And she has set you free. She makes it so you dont have to think about me. So you can be yourself again and not have to buy or change diapers. So you can party or smoke or just sit at ease without having any wieght on your shoulders. I am not her.

I want to be happy for you. But I'm not. I want to say its for the best but all I can think about is how everything I ever did I did because I didnt know what else to do, I just wanted you and me... to be okay. I tried in the only fashion I knew how, scarred and running around aimlessly trying to avoid the reality of how serious our situation was. I wasn't ready either. I put that on you. But when I needed you, you went running into her brown eyes. That mystery girl who you love more than you have ever loved. Already. After three weeks.

Being cheated is like being stabbed with a hot knife then nursed back to health only to be stabbed again. It burns and rips apart all fabric of your soul, shreds your heart and leaves that breathless, throbbing sensation. You can't breath, all you can do is think about the pain... a million regrets and what-if's poolign up in your brain making you think that you will never feel happiness again. Never feel normal, only feeling the jealousy of the one you loved jumping right into another relationship and loving your openly more than he loved you... The fear that you were never good enough... the anxiety of winding up alone because even the father of your child cheated you out of the family he always claimed he wanted... cheated on you as easy as he told you he wanted to get back together just to sleep with you...

Being cheated is like burning alive. I just have to let it burn until I feel nothing, again, and hope that there is some shred left in me to be strong enough to clean up your mess one last time and grow stronger there by.