It was 2017 and I was bitter then..
I became something I had hoped I would never have, I hoped I never had been before, I wished to be a bad guy. I harboured thoughts of some sort of revenge, I wished for the justice of things, for a recompense, reciprocity. You see at the time my now ex wife often courted the attentions of other men and I believe frequently gained them, about five that I was nearly sure of, and who knows how many others I wasn’t in the course of our time. I could not prove any of this of course because I’m not devious enough to track movements or record conversations or even look at a partners phone, but I knew I knew at the time each one happened that there was something amorous going on between her and her latest exciting male “friend”. The signs were all there, taking longer to get home from work than was feasible, a distinct difference in personal grooming, sexy underwear in the wash basket replacing the usual frumpy versions, a second sim card that could be easily swapped, new interests that had to be pursued and many more indicators besides. My ex had also helped me part with a lot of my money in her direction and the direction of her already wealthy family at times, hadn’t shared any of hers with me, and constantly misled everyone concerning her personal finances. I’d become little use to her since I had no money or prospects of getting any, and I was certainly no longer exciting to her because of the Lacanian problem she seemed to frequently express without knowing it (desire is always for the other, not for the already accumulated).
I wanted it to come around, to have visited upon her the rightful payload, but I had no way of doing so because this was not the ordinary me (the bad guy). Now people say things like “she will get hers” or “what goes around comes around” but this is not a truth, it doesn’t happen that way, bad things happen randomly, only the actions of other persons concerning the person who deserves punishment will cause retribution to be a thing. What I mean by that is that in full awareness of who people are, and without a dynamic of power or a need for or from them, the treatment of people by other people will be fair and based on their previous actions; to expand this even further what I am saying is that if we know a person to be less deserving of our pleasantness and our favour then we do not extend it to them unless we are friendly to a fault. So the key is information, that people know the story of what the offender has done, their cruelty and their attitude of selfishness is somehow exposed, but this itself has a problem within it; that the person telling the story may not wish to hold onto such bitterness and also may not be capable of being or being seen to be objective. There is also a tendency to exaggerate the harm that has been done to us, I had fortunately avoided this because the truth was staggering enough to seem unbelievable as it was; people are truly shocked when I tell how she sold her own 14 year old son the living room television (while he lived with us) because I suggested we buy a new one, or of the time when she told him we couldn’t afford his driving lessons, then booked a foreign holiday for herself only and went on to spend over £1000 on personal items for her hobbies and clothes. There is more but it would take too long…
I sat back, impotent in my struggle for some justice and resigned to the fact that I had not only been treated badly, but that history would record our time together without particularly making of it the story of woe that it should be, in fact one of the greatest resentments I had was that in the way she would tell it I would be some horrendous beast, no doubt in an effort to gain the sympathy that has always been useful to her when spearing a new fish, men are always such suckers for a sob story. At that time a strange thing happened, I met a girl on a website and started to see her socially, it turned out she worked my ex wife’s old job and worked with people who had worked with my then wife back then, and some who had done so more recently. In a perverse but pleasurable way I enjoyed what this girl had to say about it (I had been honest and told her how awkward it may be for us to date, that didn’t deter). Apparently the general opinion of my ex wife among her past and near-present co-workers was that she is a colossal asshole, utterly miserable, and a known teller of tall tales (that’s according to the girl of course). It was wrong of me to have taken from this some temporary but great happiness, but at the time I admit I really did. Combined with the fact that I had a lot of friends back home, a few close friends in Shropshire and North Wales, and that I don’t believe I have ever lost a friend in my life, the revelation that my ex’s “friends” (for she only has ever had co-workers as friends) didn’t really like her at all, was just fucking joyous. Freud could maybe have pointed out the perversity of my pleasure in this and how wrong it was, but I didn’t care, I came out of that situation having lost not a person in my life apart from her, she had had next to nobody that wasn’t temporary (I wasn’t ever aware of any old friends, and that’s weird, I mean who doesn’t have old friends?) and worst of all she had to continue being her, she had to wake up every day and be that person, and maybe there’s a justice in that alone? This positions me as a bit of an idiot, and I’ve had to wear that hat and take the ridicule I deserve I suppose, but in my defence I firmly believed that she had changed from when I first met her. In 2007 it seemed like she was trying to be a better person, and for a while she achieved that goal, but maybe people cannot change, at least not permanently, maybe they revert to type? I was still at fault though, I was a voyeur to what she was and I did nothing to protect myself or my stepson from it, I continued throughout to believe I could change her or at least keep her in wearing her better façade.
Back to the need for vengeance, I didn’t bother because it seemed that she was embroiled in enough problems living in her illusion of personal relationships. From reading the book “Women who love too much” and understanding why some people, including myself, fuck their own lives up because they maybe have an unresolved childhood issue, I had a new insight into the reality of peoples lives beyond the facade that they present. I had never felt she was truly happy, I rarely saw her laugh, my late brother once described her as a “cold fish”, “humourless and overly serious”, and asked why I ever bothered with her as she seemed to make me one too. I concluded that there is little happiness within her, maybe she had had a hard time too, that’s also punishment I suppose, and I almost pitied her when I came to that conclusion. I had pitied myself for the six years of our marriage, but when the turmoil ended life became fun and interesting and I have laughed with friends and a few girlfriends since. In the end I got involved with a person I had worked with and admired from afar in a sort of what if way while I was married. Four years behind us and it’s as good today as the first day, now that’s the all the vengeance I require, I can’t remember who said it but it’s true “your hatred only harms you, not the person you hate”…
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