ihavebeenfloated

When I found them in bed together, I wasn’t shocked. There was a sense in the last two months that he would stray from me. I knew it, I could see it in his eyes. He would still look at me with love and lust most of the time, but there were moments when I would catch him looking at me with indifference, the same way someone looks at a business partner or someone they nod a hello to on the street. I started to fear that he was falling out of love with me due to these glances, but I would blind myself to it with my own feelings of love.

When I walked into the room and saw the covers of the bed around the small of his back, his shoulder blades locked back, the muscles tight with tension, I knew there was a woman underneath him. The screech of the doors hinges startled him and he rolled over and I saw her there, hair cascading over my pillow, beads of sweat on her forehead. It wasn’t at this point that I felt the rage well in me, at this moment I felt minor indifference, a numbness that welled in me like a wave, the kind of numbness that you feel. Is it really numbness when you can feel it? What is it then, if not?

He saw me then, his eyes full of fear, he looked right into me, not at me, but into me, eyes full of fear and expectation. I was speechless, just standing there.

Then he put his arm out, slightly behind himself, over her, over the sheet covering her naked body, protecting her. That’s what made me lose it. How dare he? In front of me? Show this woman, this woman in my bed, this woman in my house, some sort of affection outside of the carnal pleasures they were just enjoying? How could he? It’s one thing to be fucking this woman, but then… To assume I was dangerous, to assume she needed protecting? Instead of rushing up to me, instead of leaping out of bed, instead of throwing on your clothes and knocking the woman out of the bed and telling her to leave… You put your arm over her? Stay back, you say to her with your actions, stay behind me, you’ll be fine, everything will be fine and then we’ll just go back to doing what we were doing.

It’s not the fucking that gets me. Fucking doesn’t mean anything, I’ve fucked people I’ve felt nothing for. But love, that is something entirely different. Caring for someone you’re fucking is powerful. You can’t just care for someone you fuck on the side and not expect there to be repercussions from the person you say you love. The physical betrayal means absolutely nothing to me, at least in comparison to the emotional. The emotional is what really hurts.

In that instant moment of surprise you chose someone. It wasn’t me. That is why you got what I thought you deserved. Damn everyone else who disagrees with me.

This fiction was inspired by this photograph: Sorry, 2003, by Seema Rao.