I did not search for the truth.
It arrived on paper -
ink already dry,
already decided.
A letter folded too carefully.
Her handwriting calm, almost kind.
The kind of neatness you use
when you don’t want guilt
to smudge.
My hands knew before my mind did.
They shook like they’d touched something dead
that was still warm.
Heart first -
a blunt, internal rupture.
Soul after -
a slow collapse, like a ceiling
coming down one beam at a time.
She was the mother of my children.
Say it slowly.
Say it until it stops sounding real.
Say it until your mouth fills with ash.
The mother of my children.
The mother of my children.
The mother of my children…
Our son’s laugh,
a sound that once proved God existed -
collapsed into something fragile,
like glass held too tightly.
Our daughter’s hair still smells like sleep,
and I wondered what poison
had already passed through her world
without her knowing.
He was outside,
dragging a stick through dirt,
building imaginary wars.
She slept with her mouth open,
breathing trust into the air.
I remember thinking -
they are innocent in a house
that just became unclean.
Infidelity doesn’t feel like rage at first.
It feels like vertigo.
Like discovering the floor
was a suggestion.
Like realizing every memory
has a second, hidden version
that you were never invited to see.
The past began to rot immediately.
Wedding vows went soft.
Laughter curdled.
Even silence betrayed me,
how many times had it stood there
knowing more than I did?
I wanted to scream her name,
but my throat refused.
Grief isn’t loud.
Grief is internal dismemberment.
It is the precise, patient unthreading
of a life you were still wearing.
Betrayal doesn’t stab.
It replaces your blood
with cold arithmetic.
It counts how many years you gave,
how many nights you guarded a future
that was already leaking out
through someone else’s hands.
I felt my heart trying to calcify,
like it understood
this was not survivable
in its current form.
The soul didn’t break -
it withdrew.
Ashamed.
Like a witness who realized
they’d been testifying
for the wrong side.
She spoke.
Her voice sounded the same.
That was the most violent part.
No thunder.
No apology big enough to bruise the air.
Just normal words
standing in a room
where something sacred
had been butchered.
The man I was
didn’t shatter dramatically.
He thinned.
Bled out through routine.
A slow, humiliating extinction.
No funeral.
Just absence spreading.
Now I live with the knowledge
that love can be a long con,
that families can be built
on ground already compromised,
that the people we trust
with our children
can quietly murder
the future
and still expect breakfast
the next morning.
There is a place inside me now
where warmth refuses to return.
A blackened chamber
where belief was executed
without witnesses.
And if I am still breathing,
it is not because I healed.
It is because something colder
took my place -
something that learned, too late,
that betrayal doesn’t end a life.
It teaches it
how to keep going
without a soul.
GBS jr
1989
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