Audio recording of some cathartic writing. Not going to over-explain, it speaks for itself.
“It can be startling how a moment of pain can bring your world crashing down around you. Even if you have doubts about something, doubts about whether it will last, or about whether it will fail, when you have it ripped away from you, it still cuts as deep as any knife. So you bandage it up, you stitch your wounds, but you don't pretend that they aren't there. You do what conventional wisdom says is healthy, try to stifle the emotional wound so that it doesn't fester and rot within your skin. You let it breathe every so often, and you hope and pray that the world doesn't decide to reopen the wound at the wrong time.
It can be startling how a moment of pain can bring about a moment of true clarity. You can spend weeks or months preparing for what you might do or say when that moment arrives, when you have the chance to either realize that you've healed or a shot at tearing the same wound open in the one who hurt you. You can play that moment over and over again inside your head and be sure of exactly how you want to handle the situation, but when that moment of pain is relived and clarity is revealed, you can hardly prepare yourself for that.
See, I've just had one of those moments, and taken a week to process it. Picture this. You build a relationship, and it's a solid one. You have some doubts about the fundamentals; religion, family, the question of children, personal mental health. You spend months questioning why there's pressure being put on to spend time with her family when all she has ever done is complain about how miserable they are, and tell you how much they disapprove of you based solely on your last name, and then you discover that she's been unfaithful, maybe not physically, not yet, but seeing someone else behind your back. You see the first sign of it, and you elucidate how much it damages the trust – the vital and essential trust of a relationship – and in order to repair that, it cannot happen again. And then, when you think things have recovered, it happens again. You shut down, drowned by the anger and the pain of what you've been put through, and immediately see it continue. So you end things, for your own sake; she denies what she had done, says nothing had happened, but then makes it quite visible what has been going on.
So you walk away, or you try to. She tries to remain within your social circle, making plans with people close to you. Those plans fall through because of the man she betrayed you with, so you react in a natural fashion, confronting her on the matter. She still denies the undeniable, and shuts you out completely. You spend weeks recovering, keeping those wounds stitched shut, letting them breathe by venting to those around you. Later you find out that she may have also been rekindling an old affair from before your relationship; it doesn't hurt as much, but it still inflames the wound. The bitterness remains, but the pain fades. Eventually, the resentment is all that's left. But then the moment of your would-be anniversary arrives, and it's a sad day, a frustrating day. But you push through it. Until she shows up that day, at a place and time she knew you'd be, with her choice of betrayer in tow. And you find your moment of clarity.
I've taken a week to process it. I had to. You see, when that kind of moment hits, you can only really experience the most prominent part of the emotions involved. What felt like pain, wasn't. There were no lingering attachments, no clinging to what could have been, and no desire to try to fix anything. There was only bitterness, and anger. The kind of anger that poets in ancient times would have used to describe apocalypses and armageddons, the kind that can barely be contained in a human body. It's easy to blame it on the other man, it really is; it's a natural outlet and far more socially acceptable to say that you'd like to beat him into unconsciousness. But the blame isn't solely on him, he was just a tool after all, in more ways than one, and the sort of tool that couldn't respect the fact that a relationship existed in the first place, and one who has been revealed to do this sort of thing more than once.
The blame for the wounds inflicted by infidelity fall on the one who committed the act of betrayal. She caused this. She caused this with her inability to actually say if there was an issue, her inability to remain true, and her inability to be honest about what was happening. She caused it with her lack of concern for the amount of pain she was about to inflict, and she made it worse by lying to my face after the fact. But I do believe that the moment that followed was one of her own pain, the pain of realizing what she had done. I remember watching her attempt in vain to fix things when the wound was still fresh, and that being followed by throwing salt after her attempts were rebuked. And now, I hold no pity, and no regrets for standing up and casting aside that which was not meant for me, that which could not be true to me.
And just as that first moment of pain brought a moment of clarity, I now sit and experience a moment of patience. In that moment of patience I know what is to come. I know that the forces that guide this universe, whatever you may believe them to be, have a twisted sense of justice that will always enact itself. Justice is merciless, and the powers that be are far more cruel than I would ever hope to be, no matter how violent my thoughts became when I set eyes upon the one I was betrayed by and the one I was betrayed for. Karmic justice may not always be swift, but its callous and passionless execution is inevitable.“
