Guilty: So Empty. My feelings in the words of Rasmus. in Musings of an Abandoned Wife

I laid with my head in his lap. Trying to feel something. Trying to get close to him. I wanted to feel his hands on me. I wanted to feel the love I knew was there. Still nothing. I felt empty. Like every cell in my body was giving up on me and telling me to just die already.

I feel disgusting and dirty. You know how men joke about feeling after they’ve crossed a line while watching porn? Like maybe they stumbled upon beastiality porn and got turned on and then felt dirty afterwards? I don’t know how that works, but I think I now know how it feels.

The first time I read that story I felt sick. I actually couldn’t read it word for word. I skimmed it. I got halfway through before I was ugly crying and throwing up in the trash.

Now it’s a few days later. I want to be with him so bad. I’m so turned on by him. But I feel dirty. I feel disgusting. And I can’t get that story, or his words about her, out of my mind.

I’m terrified that I’ll start something that will end up backfiring. I want to stroke him and tell him how much I want him. I crave that intimacy.

But what happens after that? I get started and those words pop into my head. I still haven’t read it word for word, but I know as soon as he touches my breast I will think, “He wishes they were bigger, more firm, not saggy from breastfeeding.”

When he lays on top of me I will think “He’s tired of this same old thing. He wants something exciting. You’re not exciting. You’re boring and dull.”

When he’s inside of me I will question whether I’m tight enough, whether I’m making the right faces, if I’m moving enough, if I’m still enough to turn hom on. I’ll wonder if he’s thinking about me or about bendong her over in a car. I’ll ask myself if I’m doing enough to keep his mind on me. I’ll probably offer to do something I don’t want to do because I know he enjoys it. It will not be fun for me. I won’t enjoy it. But I’ll pretend to so he’ll love me more.

I know that isn’t how it works. I know true love isn’t contingent on what a person will do sexually. No. Maybe it won’t make him love me more. But it will make me feel like I’m doing something for him. Something that will make him want more of me and less of other people.

Maybe that isn’t how it goes either though. Maybe I was never enough. Even back when we were dating he would stay up all night talking to girls online. When he went to bootcamp I was pregnant. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t look at anyone. I got hit on and didn’t care. When he went to Virginia I worried.

When he came home everything was good. But he still stayed up at night, talking to other girls. Maybe not every night, but it was enough that I knew it. There was the girl from Virginia, there was that Anna girl, and there were others randomly on his yahoo account and facebook. He knows enough to hide his tracks, but I knew then. I let him tell me it was nothing. I wanted to be convinced that it was nothing.

It. Was. Nothing.

But now it feels like something. It feels like a pattern. I want to believe so bad that he will stop out of respect for me. But I think about it. And I know that he’s “stopped” before. He stopped talking to Anna. He explained why he was telling the girl from Virginia how pretty she was.

Yes. He will stop. And I will be hopeful that he loves me again, that finally I’m enough, but I’m not stupid. In the back of my mind I will always know. And my soul will have another tattered snag. And I will patch it up with time. And I’ll keep patching over it until the empty feeling is gone. Until next time.