I hate that I needed to know and I hate that evil things happened behind my back. I really hate that when someone compliments my eyes, it makes me think of how my husband told some other woman that she had beautiful blue eyes, and then had sex with her.
The brain works in strange ways. In the wise words of Meat Loaf, “I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday.”
Sometimes, it’s a struggle to remember the happier moments. For instance, I remember Shawshank turning around at our wedding, right after being presented as husband and wife, facing my small handful of family members there. “Hi,” he said. “I’m the groom.” Most of them had never met him. When we renewed our wedding vows, Mom got a text message, and I remember the laughter in the Vegas chapel as the sound of the Jetsons’ space-car came in for a landing. I have no problem remembering those things.
Unfortunately, I remember a lot of the bad stuff. I remember the emails he wrote one of them, asking if she had any costumes she could bring when she came over. Or the excuses about why there was a condom wrapper in the trash, and later, the things he said to try to explain himself. At one point, he couldn’t run the vacuum in the house if I was home. It’s only been in the last year that I’ve been able to listen to my favorite album without remembering my personal D-day, after having sought comfort in the music right after the discovery.
Just as bad is the fact that we never seem to know just what will bubble up those memories for us. Some triggers can be avoided, but sometimes you can’t tell what the fuck will bring on a wave of shitty feelings. I can be perfectly fine one moment, and then something ridiculously mundane could happen and I’m angry all over again. Maybe it’s the trauma of it all. Reality, as we knew it, is ripped out of our grasp. Maybe that reality was already slipping through our fingers while we were holding onto it. Perhaps we were certain we knew what our reality was. Either way, it’s a shock to have a grip on something and then suddenly discover it was never in your hand in the first place. It’s like staring at a lightbulb and seeing its after-image. No matter where you look, it’s there. It’s always there.
On the other hand, I still remember everything my mother told me when we had “THE SEX TALK”. I didn’t think it was that traumatic, but maybe hearing my mother say “the penis shoots out sperm” was a little more than I could handle at 10 years old.
