Day 286 - Outcast

 OUTCAST

Prompt - Outcast : Write about a time when you had to make a difficult choice

My admission had set the process in motion and, despite her efforts to reverse from the endpoint, and my own doubts about my future, it still had a slow burning fuse of inevitability about it.  I'd told her about the affair, that it had ended, and that despite that I was left with the feeling that I could do better than I had now.  That the life we had wasn't enough, wasn't doing me, or maybe her, any good.  

After the howls of anger, the tears and accusations, it eventually calmed down, and her schemes began.  Would I go to divorce counselling?  What did she need to do to make it better?  Surely I'd be unhappier on my own?

The irony wasn't lost on me.  One of the many reasons that drove me to seek out the company of someone else, apart from the magnetic attraction, had been the up and down nature of my married life.  The constant threats of leaving, the frequent suggestion that we'd be better apart, the big bust ups without the pleasure of a proper reconciliation.  And yet now here she was, being given the chance to grab on to the one thing she's been suggesting for almost all of our time together, and pushing it away like a child been given the present they'd asked for from Santa and then complaining it wasn't grown up enough.  

So we sought out counselling.  It took months before we reached the point on the list where we could be seen.  And in those months, despite the loss of my lover from my life, there was nothing in her 'reformed' behaviour that had shown me I was wrong.  The counsellor was pleasant enough, keen to explore and suggest.  I went along with it, partly to see if it would make a difference, partly to be able to say I'd tried.  There was one session stood out in my head.  I'd been asked to leave the room for a bit, so I went out for some fresh air.  And there, across the road, was my lover's car.  She was just getting out, saw me, hesitated.  Trying to save her own marriage, so I wasn't convenient.  But so what?  She smiled.  She stood by the car, unsure what to do next.  And then the counsellor called me back in.  I shrugged and went with her.  But a part of me remained outside.

I pretended.  I pretended because I didn't know how to make it final.  But I knew it had to be, and the longer I pretend the worse it would be.  We'd done the counselling sessions.  We were, in theory, doing alright, making progress, coming together, shaping a future, any one of endless  bland platitudes that hid away what was really happening.  I didn't want to be there, to be with her.  Nothing in those two years had changed that.

I still had doubts.  Seven years living with someone makes you wonder how you'll cope on your own.  memories of the years before that time weren't always encouraging.  But I was a new person, I was not the man who'd hidden away back then.  I wanted to be out there.  

I tried to choose my time.  But no choice made it easier.  I'd decided, the only hard part was announcing it, and making sure it stuck.

So I did.

"Sorry, I know you've tired, but I still feel the same as I did two years ago.  We need to part."  I had set the final stage of the process in motion.