Day 14: I text the whore
One of the people from the bar where I spent the end of one of the worst days of my life, a kid (a very young-looking and skinny 26), walks me most of the way home. I don’t let him walk me all the way because I don’t want him to know where I live.
I start to walk the last 3 blocks alone. I see two men walking from an apartment complex towards a truck. I slow. I’m feeling especially vulnerable right now because it’s late at night, I’m drunk, there’s no else around, and I’m wearing a dress.
I get my phone ready and dial 9–1 so all I need is another 1. One man gets into the truck and turns on the headlights. The other man stands in front of the truck, in the headlights, and proceeds to take a piss.
He is facing away from me, but this still freaks me out because I’m sure they must have seen me from a distance. To pull out his penis and take a piss knowing a woman is walking alone down the street seems aggressive. I turn and walk back toward the busy road I just came from, into the light.
I watch and the truck drives away but I’m not sure if the pissing guy was in it. I wait. I don’t see anyone. I could go around the block another way, but it’s a really big block and I’m tired. I decide to run the length of the block in the middle of the street with my phone in my hand.
I make it home alive and safe and text my best friend who made me promise to text her when I got here.
I wake at 6:20. I have to meet the personal trainer at 8 am and it’s too late to cancel. I don’t have time for coffee or a shower. I brush my teeth, put gym clothes on and walk to my car, which is way farther than I’d realized until I walked it last night and this kind of sucks even worse with a hungover.
I have just enough time for a diner cup of coffee, eggs and bacon (no carbs) and arrive at my personal trainer appointment only 5 minutes late.
I am a disaster. Several times, I’m on the verge of tears because he asks me what inspired me to start on a program and what I do for fun. He comments on my sparkling ring and I say, “Yeah, I’ll probably sell it.”
The desk people lost my form from the previous week so I have to fill out another one. Emergency contact again.
“Do I have to have an emergency contact?”
“Yeah.”
Somewhere in the time span between the PT session and the therapy session, I construct the following text to Ginger the whore, which I attach to a photo of my wedding ring:
On Friday it will be 10 years since my husband put this ring on my finger. 13 years of life together. Does our marriage need work? Yes. That’s normal after so many years. That’s when the commitment needs to come in. I want you to know that what you’re doing is pushing our marriage from a fixable place to a nonfixable place. For what? An itch you want scratched? Selfish doesn’t begin to describe. It’s vicious. You are helping to destroy 2 people’s lives because M*** will regret losing me. And I will have lost my best friend and the love of my life. I’m asking you to stay away from my husband for as long as he remains my husband.
This will be my only communication to you. I’m not going to let any of this turn me into an ugly person.
It feels like a mature, honest message. I hold back all the bad words in my heart because she won’t hear me if the message is an attack. It’s important for me to make myself real to her. I’m not some invisible entity. If she has any decency, she needs to feel fucking guilty.
I just hope I sent it to the right number.
I meet with my new therapist and I’m feeling kind of numb, so I hardly cry. Only a little a few times.
She points out that when I talk about the decision to move out, I come back to the spouse quite often. What he will think and do. She explains that I need to decide based on what’s best for me. I have no control over him. This is a light bulb. If I think about the decision, purely in terms of me and what I need, this makes the decision easy.
I need to get the fuck out of here.
(This post is part of a series of daily journal entries that I’m writing as my new, uncertain life as a cheated-on wife unfolds. There may be typos and tense issues due to the lack of proper editing.)