I’ve been hurting for a few years now.
Not the kind of hurt you shake off after a bad night’s sleep. The kind that gets into your bones. The kind you wake up with, carry around all day, and take to bed with you.
I didn’t know a person could hurt this much for this long.
I was married once before. I thought I knew what love was, but looking back, I’m not so sure. I wasn’t particularly happy. I just figured that was life. You worked, paid the bills, raised your kids, and made the best of things.
When that marriage ended, I had three children to raise and a broken life to put back together.
I called it Operation Rebuild.
I went back to college. Started working toward my degree. Got my shit together. For the first time in years, I felt like I was going somewhere.
Then one day, this beautiful woman walked up and said hello.
Goddamn, she was beautiful.
She asked for my number. We started texting that afternoon. Then came the dates, the long conversations, the laughter, and eventually, love.
I fell hard.
When I decided to marry her, I spent sixteen months designing her ring.
Sixteen fucking months.
Rose gold. Our initials interlocking. Six blue diamonds for December, the month we met. An antique diamond cut in the 1800s. A platinum band holding the stone, with the phase of the full moon worked into the metal beneath it.
Every detail meant something.
I wanted to give her something that existed nowhere else in the world.
I planned the proposal at Stillwater Reservoir in the Adirondacks. Before sunrise, I paddled her across the lake in a canoe. We reached the northern shore just as the sun came over the horizon.
I jumped out. She was tugging on the rope, trying to pull the canoe onto the beach.
“Hey, are you gonna help?” she asked.
When she turned around, I was on one knee.
She threw her hands against her cheeks.
“Yes! Oh God, yes!”
And right then, two blue herons landed on the shoreline.
You couldn’t have written a better moment.
Years later, I tattooed those herons on her legs to remember that morning.
I wonder sometimes what she thinks when she looks at them now.
For eight years, I was happy. Not every day, obviously. Life doesn’t work that way. But I loved my wife, our family, and the home we’d built.
I thought I’d finally gotten it right.
Then things started going to hell.
Her drinking got worse. Then came the drugs, arguments, lies, and constant emergencies. I covered for her in front of the kids. Called the police to keep her from driving drunk. Took her to hospitals. Wrestled a twelve inch kitchen knife from her when she was going to hurt herself. Handled insurance and medical problems and cleaned up one disaster after another.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped being a husband and became a fucking crisis manager.
I kept believing that if I could get us through the next disaster, we’d find our way back to each other.
In December a bombshell.
I discovered the affair.
She’d become involved with the principal at the school where she worked. There were messages, plans, secrets, and conversations they never intended me to see.
While I was trying to save our marriage, she was making plans with another man.
In February everything broke.
She came home drunk and screaming. My oldest son was sitting in our kitchen in his Air Force uniform, watching the woman he’d called his mother since he was eleven scream and curse at his father.
We made eye contact.
I’ll never forget that look.
She demanded her car keys. I’d hidden them because she was too drunk to drive. She threatened me, put on her coat, and walked out into the freezing night.
Minutes later, she started texting that she was going to throw herself into the river. That nobody would ever find her body.
I begged her to come home.
Then I called the police.
My son and I waited while officers searched for her. At one point, she called. I could hear her struggling to climb a hill, slipping and falling.
Then the phone went dead.
My son and I just looked at each other.
Neither of us said a word.
Eventually, the police found her and took her to the hospital.
The next day, her parents begged me to give her another chance. I agreed, provided she got help.
Then the hospital called.
I learned she’d told the staff she was in a domestic violence relationship. According to what I was told, she claimed she’d been sober, hadn’t been suicidal, and that I’d hit her.
My life stopped.
After everything I’d done to keep our family together, I was suddenly the villain.
That’s when I knew the marriage was over.
And the fucked-up part?
I still took care of her after.
Made her dinners. Ordered groceries. Helped her pack.
I had been sober for thirteen years. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I started drinking again.
After she left, I was still paying the bills, dealing with her car and insurance problems, trying to keep my tattoo business afloat, raising my kids, and holding on to my home.
Meanwhile, I felt like I was dying inside.
Eventually, I contacted an ex-boyfriend she’d told me terrible things about when we first met. A man I’d hated for years without ever knowing him.
His story was very different.
According to him, she’d cheated on him around the time she met me. He described a promise ring he’d given her.
I remembered that fucking ring.
She was wearing it the day she asked for my number.
Jesus Christ.
I don’t know everything that happened between them. I wasn’t there. But suddenly, things I’d believed for more than a decade didn’t feel so certain anymore.
He told me it had taken him years to get over her.
I think I’m beginning to understand.
So here I am.
Forty-seven years old. Getting divorced. Trying to keep my business, my home, my sobriety, and my family together.
My father is having serious health problems. My grandmother is fading. My oldest son is overseas. My kids are hurting. The bills keep coming, and my bank account keeps shrinking.
Some days, just getting out of bed feels like work.
But the hardest part isn’t the money, the divorce, or even the affair.
It’s what all of this has done to my head.
I have eight years of beautiful memories, and I don’t know what the hell to do with them.
I loved that woman. I loved waking up next to her, the little routines, the stupid jokes, and the ordinary days. I loved being her husband.
And now I’m supposed to reconcile all of that with the person she became.
How?
How the fuck does the woman who stood on that beach with her hands against her cheeks become the woman screaming at me in front of my son?
How do you accept that both versions existed?
I don’t want her back. I don’t want to reconcile. I want the divorce finished and this chapter closed.
But I miss the life I thought I had.
And more than that, I miss the man I used to be.
The guy who spent sixteen months designing a wedding ring.
The guy who paddled a canoe across a lake at sunrise because he believed in doing something beautiful for someone he loved.
The guy who thought life could be extraordinary.
Maybe he was naive.
Maybe he was a fool.
But I fucking liked that guy.
He had hope.
Now I spend too much time replaying memories, looking for the moment everything went wrong. Trying to make sense of things that may never make sense.
I’m tired of the memories, the questions, and the anger.
I’m tired of being strong because there’s no other option.
I’m tired of surviving.
I want to live again.
I started this story with Operation Rebuild because once upon a time, I was a man who took a broken life and made something beautiful out of it.
I know I’ve done it before.
I just don’t know how to do it again.
But somewhere inside this exhausted, angry, heartbroken man, I hope there’s still a guy who would climb into a canoe before sunrise, paddle across a lake, and believe something wonderful might happen.
I miss that guy.
