Healing
I can’t believe I’m doing the splits. A forty-year-old man is not supposed to do the splits for the first time.
Makes me wonder what else I can do.
Let’s see. Here’s how the process works. I find the pain in me, look at it, go to the location of the discomfort, look at the sensation from within the sensation, and the pain sort of melts.
That works in the physical, but will it work in the mental? I guess I’ll just have to try. So, where’s the pain?
A few months ago. We’re separated, just to get some perspective. I’m staying with my parents. She texts me, tells me she has a confession to make, then forces me to pry it out of her. She says, “I had sex with someone in November.”
Okay, still sitting in the splits, feeling the torment of my wife’s words. I close my eyes, look at the hurt. It floats out in front of me, like a gas. I expect a battle. No, it just leaves.
Odd. Maybe that was too easy. After all, sex is just sex. That part didn’t hurt too bad. But then I asked her why.
“Because he gave me what I wanted.”
Here comes the inadequacy. I look at it. It brings its questions for me to answer. I ignore the questions and just look at the pain. It’s brown somehow. It hangs out, takes longer to go away, but eventually dissipates, like smoke into a massive sky.
Wow! I don’t feel so bad. In fact, I feel calm, kind of nice. What else?
We work through the affair from November. I’m still willing to try. I’m still at my parents’ house. More pain is delivered.
“Have you done anything else?”
“Well, I kissed Ray.”
“Kissed. Is that it?”
“Well, we touched each other, but nothing major.”
“Is this still going on?”
She pauses. My heart feels like it will explode. “Yes,” she says, but not in a guilt-ridden voice, but with the sigh of a love-stricken person.
I look at the associated feelings. That’s strange. They’re violet. Somehow, they don’t stick around long.
Wow times twenty! This trick is magic. But there’s no way it would work on that night, the night of the aftermath. Well, maybe. Let’s give her a go.
I lie in the makeshift bedroom of my parents’ house. A thousand miles away my wife is with her new boyfriend. How many Benadryls have I taken? Somewhere between twenty and thirty. Is that enough to kill a man? I hope so. I’ll just fall asleep and die. Nope. Here comes the nausea. Here comes the hammering heart, the cold sweat. Every time I close my eyes, I can’t breathe. Here comes the image of her with him, kissing him, while I die.
Out in front of me, it’s like a red smoke, billowing, but not dissipating, constantly replenishing itself. I repeat the whole suicidal sequence, remembering it all from beginning to end, see myself get up in the morning, vomit sticking to my skin, my chest tight, but alive. The smoke is less intense. I repeat again. I can see through the smoke. Then it dissipates to nothing.
Un-freaking-believable!
I’m going to be okay. When she asked me to come home, I thought I’d never feel this way. After all, he’d dumped her, and she’d made me her second choice. With all of her newfound faithfulness and love, I still couldn’t recover. Now I think I can. I can overcome the pain. The feeling is rapturous.
I wish I hadn’t killed her an hour ago. I feel just horrible. I want to forget about her face, and the way it looked while dying, about the knowledge that we’ll never be together again. I know I can’t handle the associated feelings?
But wait? Maybe I can.
So, she’s in the shower and I walk into the bathroom with a knife. I open the…
