my careless contagion

You were not the first, sir, and you certainly were not the last. But you were certainly one of the worst.  Her love affair with you was not brief. I don't know when it started, but she did tell me she was in love with you. I told her love is just a choice we make every day. These are things a man should not have to tell his wife. Who knows what she told you, what evils she relayed to you about our relationship. I'm sure I was a bad man and she deserved better, but you only got part of the story, sir. Yes, she deserved better, but so did I. She cheated on me incessantly, and my small attempts to equalize the balance of power were seen as devilish, I'm sure. But who was the bigger devil? I did lash out in anger, but mostly undetectable anger. I meant to hurt her, but in other, less-obvious ways than she did. Maybe you missed all that backstory. Maybe you didn't care. True, I was not a saint. But you two put me to shame. You spent a lot of time at my house, and o...

One of the most difficult things to reconcile when confronted with the death of a relationship is the mosaic of memories. I say "mosaic" because that's how they appear in my mind. They are little shards of time that I've pieced together and layered into an overall "picture." They don't reflect reality as it was. They are something new. The good and bad memories flow into one another. The bad memories are lightly interspersed and aren't nearly as shiny as the good memories. It's a false recollection, the way they're put together, but it's all I have now — just a mosaic of memories. What do I do with them? How do I make sense of them? They come up randomly, seemingly at odds with the feel of the moment. They force their way to the front of my brain and shove other thoughts aside. They sit and stare at me until I decide where they should go on the mosaic. Are they good? Are they bad? Are they just random moments? Do they mean anything...