A Reader Donates her Prose: “The Broken Stool”

- by Elisabeth Crago 

The day my marriage turned upside down I tried to put it upright.

It took me years to realize that the lopsidedness I felt in it was due to the fact that one of its feet had been amputated.

Trust is a puzzling thing. Hard to describe. Easy to take for granted. One of those essential elements of life that we know more by its absence. Like air—crowd it out and panic ensues.

That's how it was with my husband's hidden pornography habit.

One day we were fine -- or as fine as any couple with the usual share of issues can be. And then, in one moment, in one flash of digital nakedness, not fine.

​What followed next was a string of good moments and bad-- the yoyo of our lives inexorably changed in ways that neither of us wanted fully to admit.

I found ways to breathe again, short, choppy breaths, pockets of air found in distractions that took me away, away from the pain of loss and sometimes actually away from him. But my lungs couldn't fill.

The tension created by the lopsided stool of our relationship didn't allow for it.

A fundamental leg was at first just severely wounded. A violation of trust cut a gash in the fabric that wanted to be honesty. Love can grow with a vow of translucency and transparency. Secrecy steals the air from the room in which loves tries to breathe.

The wound might have healed. Honesty and accountability could have allowed scar tissue to form. But that is not what happened. Denial and deceit filtered in, crowding out honesty and, with it, trust.

The wound grew each time a lie was revealed.

Until one day I realized that I would bleed to death. One day I finally felt powerless to fix what only I perceived to be a problem.

One day I finally understood that breathing is impossible when choking on denial and deceit.