When I think about the laughter and the fun times and the joys shared over nearly nine years, I feel deep sadness and a sense of loss that is so profound it feels more like a death than a break up…I am in every sense of the word “mourning,” but it really is, when I think about all of the lies of this summer, a loss of a dream…If a person says “I love you” but then on the same day, or in the same week, or during the same month, or over the worst summer of your life, lies to you, in person, right in front of you, to your face, looking right into your sad green eyes, which is the lie?? The love?? Was it ever true?? It’s all a loss of the imagining, the ideas of what we were creating together, and the thoughts we shared about the kind of future we thought we wanted together, the family we had blended, the bonds we had forged…It turns out it’s a loss of what never was…

If like me you are a very trusting person, to find out you have been lied to, right to your face, multiple times over many weeks or months, by someone you love, someone looking right into your teary green eyes, or via text message or over a phone call, the truth becomes something that you question so fully you start to wonder, “was that a lie too?” when thinking about past events, or frankly the whole past of the relationship…you start to question things that you never questioned before…it’s exhausting, and sad, and serves no purpose but to make you feel worse than you already do… I have begun to recognize there is a before and there is an after…simple as that. Before I was lied to and after I found out I was lied to…and the woman who experienced that betrayal, the woman who trusted fully with her whole heart and was deceived, is not the woman writing this evening. The woman writing this evening feels empty and angry and sometimes it is hard for her to imagine she could have been so misled, so fooled, so foolish…I want to think not…I want to think that it was only this terrible summer, this terrible summer of terrible choices and terrible decisions that the lies began, and the life we were imagining together started to unravel and spiral out of control. I want to think it was only this summer, but now I simply don’t know…

I would like to believe that the honesty and the trust that I thought we had for each other, and together, was sound and real for the thousands of days we were in love, before all of the mess. I started to make a timeline for myself last month, trying to find out when it started, the ending, the unraveling, but now I think it’s rather pointless, as is has not made me feel any better at all, because what I think now is that it does not matter when things turned so bad and so ugly and so full of lies, only that they did. Maybe I was too busy to notice, maybe it all started much earlier in the spring, maybe it’s been more than a year, maybe it’s been most of the relationship…maybe I was too naive and trusting to even realize things were going bad at all, and that things were happening right under my nose and under this roof and before my eyes, but I was not seeing what was real, I was seeing what I wanted to see.

I believed a truth, that we had a plan to share a life together, and were both working hard so that someday in the future we would not have to work so hard, and we could find a different place to live together, with lower property taxes and no greenheads. We talked a lot about it, that instead of having a B&B we would open a D&D and call it *dinners and dreams* and I would clean and he would cook and we could have a home and business on a lake somewhere…it was the conversation on countless nights when we sat down to amazing meals we prepared. So many times over many years, we talked of where we might want to go, someday…So sometime in the early summer one of us stopped thinking about THAT, and started to think instead only about himself, and what he wanted, and not about a future together at all…one of us began to behave as if there was no “us” at all and the only future ahead was one that did not include me, and did not include trust, and did not include shared goals or dreams, and certainly did not include plans of sharing a life together on a lake, in a tidy home with crisp white linens and a fabulous kitchen with a butler’s pantry…

There are many things that happened this summer that have shaken me up and spun me around and made me question so much of the last nine years that I sometimes have to just stop myself from thinking at all…why bother?? says the smart part of my brain…why bother dissecting the past, why bother dwelling on the big question, “HOW DID I NOT SEE THAT THIS WAS HAPPENING???” Because the truth of the matter is it did happen, the truth of the matter is I had it happen right under my nose, the truth of the matter is I no longer know what was true and what was real and what was a lie or what was made up…nothing is certain anymore, and yet for many years the one thing that I thought was the truest truth, was that we had total trust in one another, that we never had to wonder, that we were honest, of that we were once certain, or so I thought…that is all gone now, it is cloudy and cracked like an old broken mirror tossed in the dump…it was once crystal clear and bright and crisp, and reflected so much that was beautiful, and now it’s garbage…The truth is out there, but now I think I don’t even want to know…