I got out of bed intent on having a good day, but I’m so depleted. I took more pictures off the walls and shelves. It’s unbearable, our smiling faces pressed together staring back at me. It’s like I’m being tormented by a version of me who no longer exists. She died 10 days ago when you tossed the grenade into the house and walked away.

The explosion propelled me, fully dressed, into the swirl of Class 5 rapids. I don’t know if I’m going to make it out. Don’t know if I even want to. I keep being dragged under with each new turn of the water. I’m exhausted from keeping my head up and bruised from being dragged along the sharp rocks.

I miss my person. My safe space. My everything. You’ve been ripped away, now, a phantom limb my brain can’t let go. My body aches where you used to be.

It’s hard to imagine there ever being a time when all of this makes sense. When I feel like I’m not fighting to survive. When I feel like I actually want to survive. Right now, I’m so fucking tired. Please come back, pull me out—save me from drowning in my grief. I know I should want to save myself. But I don’t have it in me right now.

I want to be angry. Want to hate you. But I can’t. Instead, I’ve turned all that vitriol inward toward the old me who didn’t know you were hurting. The one who thought she knew you better than you did.

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One day you’ll leave my head and heart. I’ll come to a quiet place along the river to a pool of glassy water, where the sunshine rains over my weary body. Where serenity perseveres over chaos. There, I’ll be able to swim to shore and pull myself out—find my way back to life.

It can’t come quickly enough, yet I know I can’t rush it. Burying the pain of this whole fucked-up situation will only eat me from the inside out. Turn me bitter. Allow the self-anger space to flourish. Your exit has already changed me. Is changing me. I want the new version that emerges from the rapids to be better.

It’s been ten days since our last hug. Longer still, since our last kiss and our last night together, my last moments of normalcy before this alternate world you’d been secretly building crashed into my reality. How long had you been planning this? You opened that bank account two weeks before you came home and ended us. How long had you been donning the mask of the man I married, when underneath you were becoming someone entirely different?

The answers to those questions will probably never come. They don’t really need to. It might help a little to release the shards of my heart from the walls of my soul. But the real deep removal will take time and work. And right now, I have too much of one and not enough energy for the other.

Intuition is a double-edged sword for me. It’s part superpower, part curse. Following it can be a veritable mixed bag. Ignoring it, I’ve learned, is way worse.

I didn’t realize I was intuitive until well into adulthood. I thought I was just weird because I had the knack for predicting things like gifts and the endings of movies/books. Then there were other deeper, more inexplicable feelings, like how I could tell if I liked someone within minutes of first meeting them. And how accurately I could read the mood of a room simply by stepping into it.

Being an empath intensifies my intuition exponentially. My body reacts, and sometimes overreacts, when it senses any shift in the atmosphere around me.

If I expressed my misgivings about someone, my husband would shake his head and tell me I was being “harsh” or “too judgmental.” And because I always admired his innate ability to see the positive in everyone, I felt guilty and ashamed for being the opposite.

I resolved to change this about me. To become less negative and therefore more worthy of him. Was I successful? Absolutely not. I couldn’t rewire my intution. It was sewn into my nature. It was something that made me me.

So instead, I stopped sharing any negative first (and second and third) impression about others. I simply let nature take its course.

12 days before Day 0

I’m worried my husband is tired of me and maybe involved with someone else. I got a very strange feeling two days ago, and I can’t shake it. He’s in Atlanta, and I facetimed him while walking both dogs for the first time. He was laughing at the chaos but proud of my persistence in getting two spazzy dogs to walk on a leash. I was pretty proud, too. But toward the end, he looked off camera at something or someone, and…I don’t know. Something felt off. I had an immediate roiling in my stomach that rippled in waves up into my chest long after we hung up. Even thinking about it now triggers it.

I’ve felt like we’re sliding apart for the past week or so. We’ve both been traveling, so we haven’t spent much time together. When we do, we’re not in sync all the time. It hasn’t been bad, just strange.

Maybe I’ll broach the subject when he gets home. I get so worried about how he’ll take any real conversation about my feelings. He takes things so personally, and the painful look that overtakes his face—the disappointment—hurts my heart. I would rather keep it to myself than lay anything else on him. I already feel like a burden these days, with feeling so exhausted and generally unwell. That’s likely feeding my extreme overreaction and sensitivity these days.

I picked up my phone after finishing that entry and saw he’d already texted me. Odd. He usually didn’t get up so early. He didn’t start working most days until 10:00.

I took the opportunity to share my unease hoping we could talk it out before his day really got started.

But that wasn’t the case.

I didn’t hear back until after 5:00 p.m. that night.

His absence and lack of an answer did nothing to ease my intuition.

In fact, it made it much worse.

Knowing things without knowing is a blessing and a curse, especially when I don’t want to be right.

Especially when that knowing had to do with him.

[The words in italics are from my real-time journal.]

The man who sat on our back porch on Day 0 was not the man I’ve been in love with for 16 years. I presented my view of things with a calm but emotional tenor. Not anger—just sadness. Grief. Disbelief.

While he sat stoic. Poised. Like he was giving a work presentation to a room full of strangers and not ending our love story.

I felt betrayed. Hurt. Like I had once again failed myself for trusting this man wholeheartedly. For believing him every time he told me he loved me and always would.

I am an idiot. I am so angry that I let myself get here.

He kept talking about how he felt “today” and needing to be his “authentic self.” Apparently, that’s something he can’t do with me. I told him I was worried because this was such a sudden change. “I think there’s something wrong in your brain,” I said. He shook his head and insisted this is how he’d been feeling, but had to stop “faking” things for his own sake. His counselor told him he needed to tell me all the things he had been telling her.

What were those things? I am trying to remember.

The big thing was that we were all moving in different directions. That he never thought we would get here and never wanted to get here. But here we are. That I had not been listening to him for a long time. That he was tired of having the same conversation without change. That he had been unhappy “for a while,” but couldn’t tell me when it started.

I started Day 1 throwing up. I don’t know how. I only had a banana yesterday. Maybe it’s the gatorade I chugged before bed, trying to replace some of the dehydration I caused by the gallons of my tears shed in grief.

Or maybe it’s disgust at myself. At what my life has become over the course of a few days.

The woman I was just days ago is dead. Unceremoniously strangled with hands she once held and kissed and loved.

I spent a lot of the night and morning choking on the truth: This man I loved beyond everyone else no longer loved me the same. Told me—told my son—that he had “fallen out of love” with me at some point. “I love you, but I’m not in love with you and haven’t been. And I can’t fake it anymore.”

What were the repeated conversations he was talking about? The only one I could think of was about the 17-year-old being messy. What did I miss? How could I have forgotten? I was so in tuned to him, knew his mood changes before they happened, how did I miss what was happening???

I have no idea where I’m going to go from here. My body hurts like I’ve been beaten or run over or some combination. Every muscle, joint, and bone aches. My head is a thousand times heavier than my body, and yet doesn’t seem attached at all.

How is this my reality? How did this man, who swore that I would be the one who walked away without a fight if we ever ended, just end us like this? I had no choice. Counseling wasn’t an option. I was discarded, like nothing I ever said or did or believed or wanted mattered. Like I never mattered.

This is a dark place. I’ve been thrown into a Class 5 rapids fully dressed and I forgot how to swim. My body doesn’t have the capacity for movement. I can’t fight against the current, and really, right now, I don’t want to. I want it to take me underneath until I can’t come back up.

Maybe he’ll regret this. Maybe he’ll miss me. Maybe now that I’m drowning, he’ll come back and throw me a lifeline, tell me he was wrong—that he was lying—that he does love me the same way I love him. That he hasn’t been faking it. Is anyone really that good at faking love? He had me fooled.

Shame on me.

I am so angry at myself. So fucking tired and exhausted and overwhelmed. I need rest. I need rescuing. I need my husband back so my heart can stop bleeding; so my soul can stop aching. He ripped his bond away and threw away whatever part of me remained with him. He burned down our house while I was still in it.

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On January 3, 2026, my husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary at Outback, an annual tradition started on our wedding night 13 years before.

We did a lot of talking and laughing that night, as was usual. Made plans for our future, including Jags and Cubs games, my nephew’s wedding in North Carolina, and what life would look like when our youngest graduated next year.

We had a lot to be grateful for, including the solidity of our relationship. Was it free of difficult times? Of course not. But did our good days far outnumber our bad ones? Exponentially.

Every year, I asked, “If there was one thing you could change about me, what would it be?” He rolled his eyes and chuckled, said some variant of, “I’m not falling into that trap.” I asked in part because his reaction was adorable. But I also needed reassurance that he not only accepted and loved me, but that he would tell me if I was coming up short.

This year, I really wanted an answer. I had concerns about his frequent low moods and his growing frustration with our teenager’s inability to clean up. It was the only recurring disagreement we’d had in our 16-year relationship. And if there was something I was doing or not doing that could help ease whatever was eating at him, I was more than willing to change what I could. He meant that much to me.

But I never got the answer that night.

That came later.

Because while we were celebrating our marriage, toasting the years behind and all to come, replaying memories and making new ones; while I gazed into the eyes of the man I knew with all my heart would always sit across the table, I was blind to one glaring truth.

He had already checked out.

There is no happy ending.

No choice.

No compromise.

No let’s save us.

No declarations of his love.

Just words said with no emotion.

Slicing my heart.

Severing my soul.

Delivered unapologetically.

Without

Empathy

or

Compassion for their deep wounds.

Leaving only Pain,

Confusion,

Disbelief,

Heartache,

Grief.

We parted ways after promising

This

Would

Never

Be.

We’d always

Make it work,

Because he would Always and Forever

Love Only Me.

But today he left me behind.

Stepped over my

Corpse

on his way out of my life.

All to make himself free.

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Thanks for stopping by this new section of my Substack. It’ll be different than my others, mainly because it’s going to be a glimpse inside what I’ve been going through in the middle of a massive heartbreak.

The man I believed to be my soulmate decided to sever that bond quite unexpectedly. After 16 years together, 13 years married, he became a stranger overnight.

That moment—that death—happened 77 days ago. I know this because each entry in my journal counts the days of my “new reality” as I’ve called it. I’ve never kept a journal more than a week, and even when it does go beyond that, I’ve never written every single morning.

I’m going to start publishing some of those entries (the ones I can read; handwriting is awful) here, along with some other pieces I’ve written or found about grief and loss.

If you’re going through a difficult time right now, I hope my vulnerability helps you to feel a little less lost and alone. I’m not a grief and loss expert, but I’ve been experiencing it since I was four or five, when one of my earliest memories was my Papa’s funeral. I’ve been collecting loss in an infinite well of grief. As a new one drops in, it ripples through all the ones that came before it.

Thanks for being here and for letting me express myself in the best way I know how. I hope this helps you come out of a dark place and gives you comfort amid the pain. You are never alone.

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