The first thump came from the basement when I walked into the kitchen. I had just flown twelve hours straight, my body still running on base time, my head full of nothing but my wife and my little girl. I called out. No answer.
I called my wife’s phone. It rang out. No text back. We had a soft, furry carpet on those basement stairs.
I noticed it the second my boot hit the first step. It muffled my steps perfectly. I heard a man’s voice moaning before I even reached the bottom. I caught my wife with a guy I graduated high school with.
They were on our bed. She was with him, doing the thing she only did with me. The guy looked up, saw me, froze. He knew who I was metallurgical he knew she was my wife.
I jumped on him,and beat him enough to give him a black eye and a busted lip. All while my wife screamed at me not to hit him, and that she was sorry. Sorry. I got off him.
I didn’t say a word to her. I just walked upstairs. They were both still there when I left, and I drove around for hours because I couldn’t stand to be in that house. When I finally came back, she was aloneand crying.
She said it was a mistake. She said she loved me. She admitted she had slept with him three times. Three times while I was deployed eight months in Asia.
Three times while I was eating MREs and sleeping on a cot, dreaming about coming home to her. And she said she was sorry. I grew up believing love was the best thing a man could have. I joined the Marines as a private,and now I was a corporal.
I busted my ass to earn that rank. I used to want to stay a Marine forever. I used to think my life was built on something solid. My brothers at the base always warned me.
They told me women marry soldiers for benefits, for the paycheck, the healthcare, the education. They said wives get lonely when we get deployed,and they bring home a friend while we’re gone. I never listened. I told myself not every woman was like that.
My wife wasn’t like that. She was different. She smiled at me a certain way. She played with her hair when she talked to me.
I loved everything about her. Now I look at her,and I feel nothing but a cold, hollow space where my heart used to be. She smiles at me now,and I look away. She tries to hug me,and I put one arm around her while staring at the wall.
She tries to kiss me,and I turn my head. We used to drive to other states just to eat at the highest-rated restaurants, to try foods we’d never heard of. That was our favorite thing. We haven’t done that since before I left for Asia.
Now my home feels like the base. Cold. Functional. Full of ruined memories.
We don’t argue. We are more distant than enemies. She cries to me almost every day, telling me she misses me, that what she did was a mistake, that she’ll do anything for us to go back to how we were. She keeps suggesting we see a counselor.
I know exactly what a counselor would say: make up, forgive, move on. Anything that involves touching her or looking into her eyes for more than one second, I refuse to do. I won’t go. The only thing stopping me from filing for divorce is my daughter.
She looks just like me. She has my ears, my eye color, my blonde hair. I don’t need a DNA test to know she’s mine. Even if she wasn’t, she is my whole life.
I would never leave her. She is the only reason I don’t end this marriage right now. One of my brothers at the base didn’t rub it in my face like the others. I remember them all saying, “When you go home and find your wife on your bed with someone else, we’re going to say, ‘We told you so,’” But he didn’t say that.
He pulled me aside,and said, “I’m ruining my life with the right person. ” He said, “If I don’t divorce, I’ll be miserable when I could find someone great. ” I nodded. Yeah, sure.
This was not too long ago. I regret staying with her every single day. I have a daughter who hugs me at night and tells me she loves me. She heals me, whether she knows it or not.
The pain I endured in boot camp was nothing compared to this. I can handle this. I have to be there for my daughter,and for myself. I learned two hard lessons from this: you can’t trust people,and marriage is a waste.
I don’t know if I’ll ever love again. It won’t be anytime soon. I moved in with a girl after dating her for eight months. We moved fast, but we both hated our home lives,and we could afford a nice apartment together, so we said screw it and did it.
At first, everything was fine. Then I started noticing she was being shady as hell. She kept her phone glued to her hand constantly, even putting it in her pocket while she slept. I worked overnight shifts,she worked days.
When I left for work, she barely said goodbye, even though we sometimes hadn’t spoken or seen each other all day. I had been through this kind of thing before. My gut started screaming at me. So I started investigating.
She used my computer all the time because she didn’t have her own. I downloaded a different messenger program she didn’t know about, one that kept logs of all the chats. And I started reading. She was flirting constantly with other guys, hardcore.
I didn’t have proof she had physically cheated yet. But I knew it was coming. One night at work, around midnight, I told my boss about my suspicions. We had two hours before we had to do anything.
He told me to drive home,and see if she was there. I had a bad feeling she wouldn’t be. She wasn’t. I texted her,.
“Hey, where are you? ”and she answered,. “The living room watching TV. ” She was at a guy’s house, a guy I knew wanted her.
She knew it, too. The final kicker came about a week later. She went to a party with a bunch of her friends,and she didn’t come home that whole night. I saw on Facebook that all her friends were online,telling stories about the party because it was already over.
She still wasn’t home. When she finally walked in, she was acting extremely sweet, extremely loving, overly touchy. I knew something was wrong. That same day, the Charter internet guy came over to fix my connection.
While he was working, she went to bathe the dog,and she left her phone on the counter. I had to do it. I picked it up. I opened her texts.
The very first message I saw was to a guy I didn’t know:. “Did you like it when I was on top? ” The next one said,. “Next time we’ll use toys.
” She liked vibrators and all that in bed. I snapped. I had suspected,and pretty much known,but that was one hundred percent confirmation. I looked at the Charter guy, who was still working on the router,and said,.
“Dude, you got to go. I don’t even care aboutthe internet. I just found out this chick cheated on me. ”He said,.
“Yep, later,”and walked out. As soon as the door closed behind him, I lost my goddamn mind. I don’t remember a lot of what happened after that. I remember yelling,and her trying to act mad at me for looking at her phone.
I do remember one thing I said:. “So, next time you’re going to use toys, huh? ”Then I walked over to where she kept all her dildos,and I carried them out to our second-story balcony,and I threw every single one of them off into the field behind our apartment. We had neighbors below us, next to us, above us.
Then I left before I threw her off, too. I sat in my car for a while to regain composure, so I didn’t speed out of there like a bat out of hell. And then I got to watch her wander around that field, in plain view of all the neighbors,picking up her dildos one by one. I couldn’t laugh then.
I was in no mood. But now, every time I think about it, I can’t help but laugh my ass off. Anyways, update on the first part. I went through a huge depression,and a tough divorce.
But I always had my little star with me. My baby comes up and hugs me,and tells me she loves me. She heals me. I’m feeling much,much better after a long,painful couple of months.
And I’ll keep going. I got my little star with me. Who knows? Maybe I’ll find another woman again someday.
But it won’t be anytime soon. I just have to be there for my daughter,and myself.
