Diary Entry from a man’s perspective (a work of imagination)

Today, she left me.

It’s not as if I haven’t been dreading this day for the last four years but still, I couldn’t help but feel shocked that she’d actually gone through with it.

I’ve been trying particularly hard over the last few months to be the poor, useless, defenceless husband so that she would feel she had to stay with me. I think the guilt she felt was working in my favour to start with but I pushed it that little bit too far and of course, to escape, she turned to him. Neil.

 

She’d never let anything about him slip before, not once in all these years, that was, until Sunday.

I was watching the game while she was in the kitchen, she’d prepared a tea of lasagne and salad for me, it was the same meal as every other Sunday. Then she shouted “Neil, come and get your tea”. The second she said it she froze. If I hadn’t been so taken by surprise I would have pretended that I was so engrossed in the game that I had not heard her, she would have believed that but sadly she was looking straight at me when she said it and there is no doubt that my face must have betrayed me.

We ate our tea in silence, she tidied away and once the kitchen was sparkling she turned to me and said, “I’ll leave by the end of the week”, that was it. I knew there was no point in trying to talk her out of it, we both knew that I knew about him but now that it was out in the open, there was no going back, no more pretending, no more us.

So, today as promised she left. I thought she would say goodbye in person but sadly no. I went to work, business as usual and when I got home there it was, a folded A4 piece of paper. I can’t even bear to re-write what she wrote but there it was, the end of thirteen years of marriage jotted down on a piece of scrap paper. Her usual perfectly neat handwriting was more of a scrawl, no doubt in her hurry to get out before I got home I assume.

What I'll do now, without her, I really do not know.