I had been feeling the anger build, the frustration mount, and the panic pile on. My husband, let’s call him Jay for efficiency, had found a sponsor the night before and been ebullient since. I couldn’t understand this dramatic change in his attitude from depressed and mopey to all of a sudden happier than a cat in a pigeon pen. It scared me. I tried to explain to him how it scared me, but he didn’t understand and became frustrated. And that was the last straw. I became angrier and angrier. By the time I got home I was furious and raging. He was still at work and so I just screamed at the top of my lungs and with all my heart, “I DON’T WANT THIS!!!! I DON’T WANT THIS LIFE!! I DON’T WANT ANY OF THIS!!!”

Years ago, when Jay was still in college, he took a photography course. For one of his final projects he took these dramatic and beautiful black and white photos of friends and family. They were large portraits, all about 11 x 17, and we had them framed and had lived with them around our dining room ever since. One of them was a portrait of the woman I wrote about in my last post: Another Bomb Goes Off… . I had taken the photo down after he told me about his relationship with her. I couldn’t stand to look at the smarmy self-satisfied look on her fat face anymore. I took her husband’s photo down too, because though I like the guy, he’s a reminder now too of that terrible time when I was in need and my boyfriend of the time, now husband, turned his back on me and betrayed me.

In my fury on this day, I broke. I grabbed a hammer and hammered in the face of this woman in the photo. I smashed the glass, I smashed the photo, and wished it was really her face or his face, and then when the glass was all over the floor, I grabbed the photo and ripped it to shreds. It was so satisfying! I wish there were more things for me to smash to smithereens!

I didn’t want to lose my temper like that, but sometimes it builds up and it simply feels so incredibly unfair and unbearable. The pain, the fear, the anger….it’s just too much to stand. I want them (Jay and all of his APs) to hurt like I hurt, and I know that, even though they hurt from all of this or have at some point, they don’t hurt like I do. None of them know what this is like. None of them have felt pain this deep. I know this, because I have experienced more pain than most people deserve or have ever thought possible in this life from a very early age, and this is the absolute most excruciatingly awful pain I have ever felt. Both the person I trusted and loved most in the world and people, friends even, that I believed in and trusted all stabbed me in the back, over and over and over and over again.

Jay protests sometimes, “What about my pain?” It makes me want to scream at him. I really don’t care about his pain at the moment. The pain that he has caused me, the man I loved (love? I don’t know anymore), is so punishing that I want to die just so I don’t have to feel it anymore. There is no way for me to escape the agonizing hurt he and his f*ckbuddies have caused and that I in no way deserved or brought down on or chose for myself. I have to live through it. Every day. Every day I have to suffer this searing emotional pain wondering if it will ever get better.

What about your pain, Jay? F*ck your pain. Go sit on a stick and spin or take a flying leap off a cliff or a long walk off a short pier cause I really don’t want or need to hear it.

Sorry for the angry post today y’all. I just had to get it out.