Chapter VI: My Island

I recall over the summer, when I was walking to my desk, a co-worker and friend stopped me to ask how I was doing.

“Getting over him was the easy part,” I said.

It’s not difficult to stop loving someone when they show their true, twisted colors. Colors of someone only sorry if it meant they might still have a chance with you. Colors of someone who, realizing you are gone, begins to manipulate, twist the truth, and blame you for their own actions and situation. Colors not of a man, but of a coward.

I told her I wasn’t sad; that’s not the feeling that lingered. While I was constantly surrounded by friends and family, it was the loneliness that remained. Not loneliness because I was alone in a big house with empty walls or because I no longer had someone sleeping next to me; but loneliness in the wake of such deception. Nobody could ever truly know the pain, the strange freedom and the sadness all rolled into one constant, ever-evolving emotion. In that respect, I was completely alone.

“Yea, you’re kinda on an island all alone,” she said.

She was right.

***

After the confession, my time on my island began in my room. After I dragged myself out of the bathroom, I got in bed fully clothed and just sat there. I texted with two trusted friends to explain what had just happened. It was late but they responded. I remember my hands shaking with every word I typed. One didn’t know what to say; utterly speechless. The other called me and we talked for a bit. I truly don’t even know what was said. I couldn’t bear to call my mom that night. I had to think.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. A few times I walked out and asked him more questions.

“Was she on birth control?”

“Yes.”

“Then how did this happen?”

“She said hers takes three months to work.”

“What?!”

I’d march back in the room, shut the door and think some more. He said it was one time. How could that be? This is the person who said I should never be in contact with an ex, the person who said I must delete all pictures with them; never speak of them again. Yet, he was clearly back in communication with this person long before he cheated, long before he was upset about my text messages while planning his birthday. He had told me that they had been in communication for some time. He said she reached out to him to speak about her retirement account; did he really think I was that stupid?

I was trying to understand how one could be so deliberate. He had to take my car and drive 52 miles in Chicago traffic to go see this person.

“Did you know it was going to happen when you went up there?”

“I don’t know.”

If he didn’t know, why would he go and risk it? Did I mean so little? Or were you so self-centered to not even think about me at all?

“Well I felt bad when I left.”

Oh. That’s good? What do you even say to that?

The dialogues you replay in your head over and over; disconnected rambling of a mess always replaying and skipping like a scratched CD from my childhood. In all reality, just him stuttering as he thought of what lie to tell next.

***

The truth behind what I was thinking on my island of blankets and tissues in my dark, forlorn room, was how I was going to make this work. Its nauseating to think that’s what I was trying to remedy. I was truly trying to figure out how I could stay with this person. How I could be there for him, his child. Was I a strong enough person to do that? Would I be able to marry this person in September and become a step mother two months later? Was she even pregnant? Was it even his?

That was the other thing. If you sleep with someone “one time,” would you really not request a paternity test? I recall researching and discovering you could do that before giving birth. I thought it was telling that he didn’t want to and hadn’t already asked if it was his. It took me time, but I eventually knew it wasn’t just once. Due dates don’t lie. He did.

That next morning I emerged from the room and asked what we were going to do. He said he was checking into a hotel to think about what options we had and that he’d give me a solution in the morning.

He left and I went back to my dark island and waited.

***