sunshinechapter

[sunshinechapter]

7.29.25

We used to say our anniversary was the day we met because we just knew from those first moments.

And the story of how we met was my most favorite story to tell. The way I'd swell with giddiness and pride when people would ask me to tell it.

Everything was so simple in those early years. Everything felt exactly right. I didnt need to ask any questions because I knew in my heart, soul, and spirit, that we were meant to be.

Captioning every anniversary post with "true love is real, thats all I really have to say."

Friends calling us "mom and dad".

Im not sure exactly when things changed. It was probably as they say, a million tiny cuts or something like that.

But it did. It went from living in a fairytale to you threatening to withhold sex when I asked you to stop drinking.

To you destroying my art supplies and putting holes in the walls.

Smashing your wedding ring flat and losing the stone because you were in a drunken rage.

Screaming at me that I'm a cunt, feckless, stupid, oh and of course, a coward, for trying to defend myself when you cut me down.

To openly responding with disbelief and contempt when I told you I wasn't trying to lose weight.

To me begging you to go to dinner with me for my birthday and still ending up going alone.

To me hiding in the closet while I listened to you break things, again.

And a thousand other examples of the nightmare our life together ultimately became.

Funny thing, time. In just 10 years we became unrecognizable.

[sunshinechapter]

6.26.25

What truly must be worse than my regrets, my heartbreak, and my bad memories is wondering what became of us.

I know in my heart I could not live the way you do, with this massive looming question mark in the place of my old life.

Waking every day and wondering *what are they doing today?* *how have they been?* *where are they now?*.

I wonder sometimes if it feels as good as you had hoped, to finally be free of us. I wonder if you sit with yourself and know that you finally got everything you ever wanted. I wonder if you are smug and pleased with yourself, or if you break under the weight of the nothingness you have plagued us both with. Comical, really, pretending you're doing anything else than drinking it away.

I was a bit smug today. A bit pleased with myself, because I realized how much better things are without you. Of course, objectively, its better - everyone's life is better without alcoholism and domestic abuse. But it really *felt* like we are so much better off without you. I think they are happier. I am getting there.

We are still a family. We never needed you at all. And that is something I am grateful to be rediscovering every day.

[sunshinechapter]

Living alone, I am repeatedly presented with such vast emptiness.

Each day holds countless microscopic moments, moments that were once filled with tiny interactions that build the empire of a life together.

Now its just me, in silence.

The moments pass - I take note of them still, torturing myself with memories of what used to fill them - and then they quietly slip away. As if they never even occurred. And I remain, unmoved, in nothingness.

Maybe it didn't. Maybe it was all some horrifically vivid dream-turned-nightmare and tomorrow I'll wake to a life in which I never even met you.

The yearning to rewrite the past hurts as much as the heartbreak, if not more. All those lost years, all that time I can never have back. The weight of my regret hangs on me, unrelenting, every fucking day.

Everyone else has forgiven me; why can't I forgive myself?

[sunshinechapter]

6.19.25

🎶The future can't be real, I barely know how long a moment is.🎶 

I Love You Honeybear is haunting me. I always thought that album was for us, though he never listened to it at all. I privately believed it was our album, though I was completely on my own in this. As I was for most of it, in length and quality. I am trying to reclaim it, decouple it, because the music is just so damn good. But it isn’t really working. It just brings my ocean of regret crashing into my daily life. 

Jesus can't you just leave me alone? Get away from me. You already walked away and dropped me like some analogy about a bug or garbage, can’t you stay gone? 

The truth is, you are. And I really didn't want this to become me talking to you but I guess thats what this is now. I didn't want to need to talk to you, at you. I wanted to be smiling and free, cut loose and loving it. No. And it isn't even you that I miss. That is the thing. I didn’t care for the [LIST OF SHIT I HATED ABOUT YOU] but I did love being a wife. 

That makes me cringe. A wife. Don’t I want more from life? Aren’t I capable of so much more, of wanting so much more than to be someone’s nurturing counterpart? I used to be. 

Perhaps it was the delusion I loved most. I truly believed the lie. That I was understood, and loved unconditionally. Those are the things I want most. To be treasured and marveled at - adored by a partner who does so BECAUSE they know me, BECAUSE they know everything I reluctantly carry and have angrily endured. To be more than loved, to be known. 

I suppose after all those years and all those drunken nights, you did know me. And you became filled with resentment instead of compassion. That is not my fault at all. For all the grief I give myself for “choosing wrong” - how could I have known you would turn out this way? I am sure in retrospect there were signs, though you were a masterful charlatan. And I was 19 years old. Everyone is stupid at 19, right? 

Maybe stupid is too harsh, though that is what it was. Naive, undoubtedly. And everyone is naive at 19.