A Farewell Message to My Former Lover’s Wife…

Sunday morning.

The day after.

I am leaning over the sink, scraping yesterday’s smeared party makeup from my face.

I was tired inside and out when I came home, so I did not bother washing it off.

I simply curled up between the cold pillows.

The bed was cold too, although I knew it could have caught fire within a minute if I had come home with Him instead of alone.

But I did not.

And however miserable and lonely I feel right now, I am happy.

I look proudly into the mirror, crawl back into bed, and think about you.

You were at the party yesterday too.

Your nails were conspicuously painted red and your lips carefully covered in lipstick.

I assume your mother was looking after the child at your place.

You chatted with visible effort and seemed slightly tense.

He kept bringing you fresh drinks whenever your glass was empty.

Until now, you rarely went out.

At least from what I know, your thoughts revolved almost entirely around your child.

Perhaps none of that matters.

I watched you and wondered who you actually are.

There can be no more than five years between us, yet sometimes it looks like more than ten.

Your face looks tired.

I do not think you ever had especially soft or gentle features.

There is something determined and tightly controlled about you.

Still, your taste is good.

Not only in clothes, of course.

After all, you are His wife.

You were beautiful on your wedding day.

At least in the photographs.

Every movement radiated triumph:

You had won.

He was yours now.

I did not know either of you then.

I only heard from mutual friends that nobody expected the marriage to be particularly happy.

You argued a lot.

You broke up too.

Somehow you did not seem to fit together.

And still, you wanted the marriage.

Perhaps because of family expectations.

Perhaps because you wanted a baby.

It does not really matter.

What I remember now is meeting your husband later.

The pride in his smile.

The joy of becoming a father.

I was happy for him.

Back then, in my eyes, you were a happy couple.

And I happened to be in a difficult emotional period of my own.

Time passed.

And slowly, the icing began to melt.

He became increasingly unhappy.

Tense.

At work too.

There was enormous pressure on him.

You always had high expectations.

He tried very hard.

He wanted to be a good father.

To provide everything.

Yet somehow, he himself gradually disappeared from the equation.

Everything revolved around the child day and night.

He became invisible as a man.

And you no longer seemed to ask for attention as a woman either.

He escaped more and more often into the gym.

Sport.

Beer with friends.

Of course, I know this only from him.

Perhaps you would tell the story differently.

If you ever spoke to me.

You never did.

From the first minute, you looked at me with sharp suspicion even when I tried to be open toward you.

So how did your husband and I become tangled together?

I think our walls collapsed at the same moment.

Walls we had built to protect ourselves.

And underneath them, both of us were desperately longing for someone to care about us too.

Alcohol played a role.

So did the dim light.

The loud music.

The corridor balcony where we ended up alone.

Time disappeared.

All I could feel was his heartbeat beneath my palm.

His tense muscles.

Neither of us wanted the kiss to end.

Why had we met only now?

We escaped into one another.

I did not seduce him.

I was not dressed provocatively.

My makeup was not provocative.

And still, we pulled toward each other like magnets.

I did not want to become a mistress.

I had already lived on every side of that triangle:

betrayed, unfaithful, the other woman.

And on the earlier occasion when I had been the other woman, I had been the one to end it.

I never wanted to take what belonged to somebody else.

Your husband and I resisted for a very long time.

We wanted one another.

But we tried not to talk.

Not to meet.

Still, we were drowning.

And every kiss gave us air.

And a sense of freedom.

How many times did he cheat on you with me?

Where?

How?

It does not matter.

One time, we simply sat opposite each other on the bed.

He told me he did not believe in eternal love.

He said he was not happy.

But he knew it was his duty to give you and the child everything.

We talked for a long time.

Then I said goodbye.

I told him:

Whatever it costs, repair your marriage.

You cannot live an entire life like this.

Not inside a lonely sugar-coated performance.

I let him go because I loved him.

Years passed.

The child is no longer small.

In fact, there is already the same strength of will in them that I see in you.

The child gets everything.

He, meanwhile, has become more and more a shadow of the man he could have been.

Or perhaps the man he might have become beside me.

If…

But there is no “if”.

There is only reality.

You are beside one another.

But perhaps not truly together.

How do I know?

Because yesterday, while you were deeply engaged in conversation with friends whose noses were held at least as high as yours, his eyes met mine again.

He walked toward the bathroom.

I finished my cocktail at the bar.

Then I followed, moving through the crowd.

We stepped outside for air.

No coats.

Freezing cold.

We simply stood and looked at each other.

Then we held hands.

It felt as though not a single year had passed.

Somehow we had carried one another inside us the whole time.

I began shivering from the cold.

But something else was trembling in me too.

I had missed him painfully.

He pulled me into his arms.

And I began to melt like a snowman.

But this kiss hurt.

I already knew we could no longer give each other strength.

Separately, both of us had become stuck on our own roads.

And together, we were not allowed to walk.

I was angry.

At you.

At him.

At myself.

Why is loving well so difficult?

Why does love sometimes require letting go?

Why do you not understand that you can never own him?

That perhaps he was never truly yours?

How long will you continue acting on this stage and lying to yourselves?

What are you so afraid of?

I came home.

He drove you home too, because of course you had already called him impatiently.

You were tired of the party.

It is Sunday morning now.

The kind of morning when you want to curl up beneath a blanket on the sofa with the person who matters most in the world.

If He were with me, we would probably go for a walk or a run.

Then take a shower together.

Cook.

And the food might go cold before we ever got around to eating it.

In the evening, I certainly would not be reading company emails.

What are the two of you doing?

The obligatory Sunday-night sex?

Once a month, if you are lucky?

Are you lucky?

When you look at him, do you understand that somebody else would give almost anything for him?

That beside me, he often felt far more like a man than he ever seemed to beside you?

Or perhaps I am wrong.

After all, he is not beside me.

And still, this morning, I find myself thinking about you.

Fight.

For yourselves.

For your marriage.

But without weapons.

Real strength is in letting go of control.

In softness.

Attention.

A playful smile.

Love him.

Or let him go.

But never live from fear.

Because then you are not truly living.

There.

That is my secret.

I have already taken off my gloves.

---

Who are you still fighting?

I know you are afraid of me.

Afraid because I am younger.

Beautiful.

Passionate.

Because I love being a Woman.

Perhaps you fear that you will never dare to be what you imagine I am:

someone who can risk everything for nothing.

Completely.

Even inside a single kiss.

And perhaps my own fear is simply that one day, beside somebody else, I might become exactly what you are now.

(The cover image is only an illustration.)

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