This Is What It Feels Like When Your Husband Cheats On You

For the briefest of seconds the earth stands still, and all is right, all is good. You can feel it, though. It’s too right.

In an instant, with the next breath, the earth starts spinning, a little too fast and slightly off its axis. The ground starts angrily shaking, and you can see a fissure where you just know, in your soul, the ground is going to open up and try to consume you. It is angry, and it wants to swallow you whole. You grasp for anything to hold onto as you feel the spinning of the earth and the pull toward devastation.

You can’t breathe. There is no air. You gasp to get air into your lungs, but it just isn’t there. Your stomach turns, and you feel the anger in there too, fighting to overtake. You have the strangest feeling of absolute loss of control over your body. You’re going to wretch in this spinning, angry, airless space.

You can actually feel your heart fracturing. Your insides are burning, and the ground continues to violently spin and shake. You look from left to right, but there is nobody to cling to, nobody that can rescue you from this. The ground is wanting and waiting to consume the fragile, broken body that was created in a blink.

You’d give anything to go back 15 minutes, before your world changed forever. You’d give anything not to know. You’d give anything to know it all.

You can’t.

Stop. You can’t know anymore.

But, there’s so much more to hear. Little pieces, like a puzzle, that slowly come together and start to make sense. So many lies, that in the midst of this violent, angry world in which you’ve been thrust, start to become truths.

Everything is upside down, and, through tears of anger, rage, loss, and love, friendships become little jokes, and you are the punchline.

This is what infidelity feels like.

Your best friend, in the blink of a tear-stained eye, becomes a complete stranger. This person with whom you’ve been intimate and shared your most private secrets, becomes someone you don’t know at all.