The Rise & Fall of Naive Adulterer: Part 1

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.’

The vibration of my phone on my nightstand woke me in the dim morning light. It was Her. How had it happened? When had it started? Had it always been this way and I just didn’t see it? I had loved waking to her texts the last couple days. Had it only been a couple of days? My life before Her seemed like it had been a dream, not true memories. There was tense amorous anticipation with each message. Almost like trembling, hesitation, bated breath. We described the sensations we were feeling to each other, butterflies in the stomach, our hearts beating faster. Were we fooling ourselves? Playing with each other? Or was this real? We’d never seen each other in person. It had started with an innocent off-hand message regarding a mutual friend, then some innocent flirting, and then suddenly we were discussing intimate details of our lives and exchanging pictures. Now we shared every day together, not because of some formal agreement, but because we wanted to, it was as natural as breath. I had searched my instant messaging app’s history to see if I could pinpoint when it all happened, we’d exchanged so many messages that the history had all been erased back that far.

It was love, there could be no question of it, or at least it was what both of us knew of the feeling of being in love with someone. It was terrifying. We were both adulterers. We both had loved people other than our spouses in the past, but never had we found mutual love, or love this intense in our lives. We spoke about turning back many times, but we knew we couldn’t turn our back on what we’d discovered, or we would regret it forever. I had never had any serious thoughts that I’d leave my wife for another woman. I couldn’t foresee having those feelings. But I was having them. That doesn’t mean that I’d make good on them, I couldn’t see the future, but they weren’t just fantasies, they were serious considerations now, despite the huge obstacles in the path: we were both married, we lived hundreds of miles from each other, and we had never met.  I wanted to grind those obstacles to dust by sheer willpower. But was I actually willing to step over the edge of the abyss?

Is this the beginning of the end to our story?