She’s due back anytime. I need to leave, but I keep waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what, but something. Something needs to happen. I want things to happen. I need things to happen. Something. Anything.

It’s not what I thought it was going to be, this being in your house. I don’t know what I thought it would be like; I guess I didn’t think. I guess I was so caught up in my own wants and my own needs, I didn’t stop to think about very much else at all.

It smells in here. When I say that, I mean that it stinks in here. Like it stinks of the people that live here — stinking of the food and the clothes and the juice boxes — the stickiness and the funk of the children and the mess of your life with her, with them — the loud, glorious, sloppy, and wonderful life that you live here, with her, with them, every single day. It reeks of the mud and the shit and the busy mornings and exhausted evenings — it’s a cloying odor of love and laughter and life that hangs in every room. It’s not what you described. It isn’t what you told me. It’s cloying and it’s true and it’s making my head hurt so much that I have to sit down on the edge of one of the dining room chairs and bury my forehead in my hands. Although only you and I are in the house, the toys strewn everywhere — the stink — the breakfast plates still on the table, milk souring — it feels so crowded. It’s so noisy. Everything is screaming. I can’t think, and I need to think.

I hate you for having this, for having all of this and needing something more. For betraying all of this — this beautiful chaos, this majestic horror, this appalling, Rockwellian, disgusting assault on my senses — how could you do this? I suddenly find you loathsome. I am glad for you being across the room, on the couch, because if you were nearby, I’m afraid my hatred would dissolve back into passion. As quickly as I am emboldened to hate you, I am drained of energy. Everywhere I look, I see your life outside of us — I see them — and I hate you for needing something else. How could you be so fucking selfish? How could you be so unbelievably single-minded? How could you lie to me the way that you did — how could you pretend that this gigantic life filled with vibrant color and loud noises and so much was somehow so little?

I didn’t expect this. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect any of this.

I have a hard time breathing. I keep focusing on things like the buckle on my shoe. The frayed seam on my jeans. The dry skin on my thumb. If I focus on things like that, maybe I will remain conscious. When you speak to me, it sounds as if it’s coming from a great distance. That’s what happens right before I faint. But there’s no way in hell I’m fainting on your disgusting carpet — the carpet where you play with your children. The carpet where you fuck your wife. That dirty, filthy carpet that needs to be vacuumed and steamed and cared for but your stinking, gigantic, vibrant and inescapable life of details keeps getting in the way.

I stand. You do the same. I can’t look at you. I glance around my feet, looking for my bag. You tell me you want to hold me. I shake my head and mumble — I know I’m not making sense but I still can’t meet your gaze — and I stare off into the kitchen. I see things there I wish I had not seen, like the assignments your children have brought home from school and proudly tacked onto the refrigerator door. Like the magnetic letters spelling out French words on the side of the fridge, where the little ones can barely reach. I imagine you sitting there, night after night, proudly encouraging them to pronounce those words after you. But you were supposed to teach me French. All I want to do is throw up on the floor and run out of the house, screaming like a madwoman – like the madwoman I fear that I have become tonight. I want to flee. I want to kill you first, though, then I want to flee. Maybe if I kill you, this terrible keening in my heart will stop, and I will be able to go on living afterward, after this betrayal, after the discovery of this web of lies — the lies you told me, and the lies you were telling yourself.

The moment I look at you, though, all thoughts of murder leave my mind. You’re crying. You can’t say goodbye, and you won’t. Two years later, when it’s all still shockingly lingering on, when it still won’t end, you will tell me that the hardest thing in the world you’ve ever had to do is to watch me walk out of your home and not go with me. You will tell me that when you kissed me there, amidst the chaos of your children’s toys, with me clenching my bag in my fist and my body stiff as a board in your arms (because I was already gone already out the door but my heart wouldn’t go just yet was still waiting for that something to happen for anything to happen to change something I don’t know what), that all you wanted to do was run away with me, be with me forever, never let me go.

But that night, in your living room, against all that is right and good, I love you. I love you beyond logic and reason, beyond all sense and beyond the circumstances. I love you so much that it is physically unhealthy for me. Even when you are kissing me, and my mouth and nose flood with your sweet aroma (soap, coconut, mint, and you — the unmistakeable perfume of your neck and your hands on my face), blocking out the stench of your reality — your real world — I am momentarily transported back to the place we had created for just the two of us. For a few blessedly quiet moments, breathing you in and tasting you, I forget where I am — where we are — and I yield to you.

Then it’s over, and we’re back in your living room, and I feel like something bad is happening inside my body, because everything is so wrong — the feelings I feel conflict so much with what I see around me, with where I am and what I know — that my body is ripping apart, like my internal organs are exploding, like my brain is melting and my skin is flaying off in wispy flakes from standing too close to the sun. I don’t know anything anymore. I’ve smelled too much reality, and it has hurt me beyond description. It has ruined me, us, everything.

It will take years for the love to recede like floodwaters, and for all of the truth to surface, for me to sift through what remains and see you for what you are, and me for what I’ve become.