After things ended last Sunday, I was feeling calm, resigned, and ready to move forward. When I found out about her on Wednesday, I felt shock, anger, but mostly relief that my intuition had been correct. I had moments of sadness which took my breath away and left me sobbing, but they were fleeting. Mostly when I was in the shower; not sure why. but I was doing okay, and surprised at how strong I felt.

Since Monday though, I’ve been feeling odd. I can’t relax, nothing seems fun to me. I’m off work because of an injury (have been for weeks) and, where I used to just happily lean into the abundance of time, it now just seems so big and quiet. I don’t want to watch TV, read, journal. Can’t go out for a walk (injury). I don’t want to think about him, either, but I find the wheels spinning when I know it’s just wasted energy, and no part of me really wants to dwell. But I can’t find anything else to push it out of my brain.

The hardest part is that I miss him, or what I thought was him. I miss his texts, his voice. I miss our friendship. Part of me wishes I didn’t know about her (them, probably more than one) and I could have gone on just thinking we weren’t right for each other and it ended explosively, not that he’d been lying to me probably forever and about everything. And it doesn’t help me to know he was likely texting other women. I want to think something was real; this man and I became close through very similar, painful circumstances. And I know that wasn’t a lie; I witnessed it. I know he was once capable of loving deeply; I witnessed that, too, and watched him fall apart when she suddenly died 13 years ago. He still comments on her photo, every 3 years or so, that he loves and misses her.

But it doesn’t matter what I want, I’ll never know what was real and what wasn’t. I’m just trying to fill up the empty space where he used to be, and I’m not finding much success. And, unfortunately, I can probably only afford to see my T once a week.