I betrayed my wife, and now I can’t tell which of my feelings for her are real. That’s the thing that actually ruined something in me. Before, when I felt tenderness, it was just tenderness. Now every warm thing that moves in me toward her comes with a second question attached: is this love, or is this the apparatus?
I held her at her father’s grave and I meant it. I know I did. But I also know I’ve meant things while doing the opposite. That’s what I can’t escape anymore. A liar loses access to his own interior. That’s the punishment, and nobody warns you about it because from the outside, you can still look exactly the same.
She thinks I’ve become more emotional with age. She finds it sweet. Last month she was sick and frightened, and I sat up with her all night. In the morning she told me she didn’t know what she’d do without me, and I felt something enormous. I just couldn’t tell whether it was love, guilt, fear, or some mixture of all three. Even my most genuine moments now arrive contaminated by the knowledge of what I’ve hidden.
Then she told me there was something she’d been meaning to tell me since 2018. She said she’d kept it to herself because she didn’t know how I would react. I remember thinking that whatever it was, I would finally have to listen without calculating how it affected my secret. Then she looked at me and said, “I’ve known for a long time that something changed in you. I just never knew whether you were becoming more honest or getting better at pretending.”
