Chapter 2.5: Between Heaven and My Imagination - True Story

 

(After the kiss...)

I went home.

Not to celebrate.

Not to cry.

Not even to replay it over and over the way I usually would.

Instead, I did something I had never imagined I'd do.

I went looking for answers in places most people would probably laugh at.

The spiritual world.

When your heart is confused, you'll knock on almost any door if you think the truth might be hiding behind it.

I wasn't looking for permission to love him.

I was looking for permission to let him go.

Before any of that, though, there was something I need to confess.

Finding out he was married didn't make me dignified overnight.

It made me angry.

Not the kind of angry that screams.

The kind that quietly says, "Fine... watch this."

A mutual friend had shown me proof.

There it was.

His Facebook profile.

Married.

A beautiful wife.

Three beautiful children.

Just like that, the future I had been secretly building inside my head collapsed.

I should have walked away.

Instead, I did something completely out of character.

Because he followed my private Instagram account, I created a Close Friends list with exactly one person.

Him.

My first post wasn't seductive.

It was wounded.

"If you can see this, you're the only one. I believed you were single. Now I find out you're married with three children. I'm embarrassed. Please block me. Go cherish your family."

I tagged him.

I waited.

Instagram told me he had seen it.

Nothing.

No reply.

No apology.

No block.

Silence.

For reasons I still struggle to explain, his silence hurt more than the lie.

So I kept posting.

Not because I wanted revenge.

Because I wanted him to understand what I couldn't find the courage to say out loud.

Sometimes the posts were funny.

Sometimes they were vulnerable.

Sometimes they were undeniably flirtatious.

The music said what I was too embarrassed to admit.

The captions revealed the desires I knew I could never act on without betraying my own respect for marriage.

When he still didn't block me...

I pushed the boundary.

One day I admitted that I wanted him.

Another day I joked that whenever he was ready, all he had to do was call.

Every notification felt like gasoline poured onto feelings I should have been trying to extinguish.

Seven days.

That's how long I stayed trapped inside that version of myself.

Seven days of trying to be seen.

Seven days of hoping that maybe, somehow, reality would rewrite itself into the ending I wanted.

Then the guilt arrived.

Not all at once.

Quietly.

Like sunlight creeping under a closed door.

I looked back through everything I had posted and barely recognized myself.

That wasn't who I wanted to be.

The truth was much simpler than the performance.

I didn't want to tempt him.

I wanted to love him.

I wanted to build a peaceful life with the man I believed I had met.

The man who listened.

The man who smiled with his eyes.

The man who spoke about working hard and dreaming big.

The man I believed was free to choose me.

But that man existed mostly in my imagination.

Looking for peace, I sought spiritual guidance.

I was told things I had no way of proving for myself.

That there were more chapters to his life than I had ever seen.

That there were wounds, complicated relationships, and hearts connected to his story long before mine ever entered the picture.

One name surfaced more than once.

A woman I will simply call Miss Y.

Whether every detail was literally true or simply reflected the emotional reality surrounding him, I cannot say.

What mattered wasn't whether the reading answered every question.

It was what it revealed about me.

I had become obsessed with solving a puzzle that was never mine to solve.

Whether there was another woman.

Whether there had been someone before her.

Whether he was trapped.

Whether he was unhappy.

Whether he loved his wife.

Whether he loved anyone at all.

None of those answers could change one simple fact.

He had not been honest with me.

That was enough.

And yet...

I couldn't bring myself to hate him.

That confused me almost as much as everything else.

Because the man I knew was generous with his friends.

He adored his children.

He worked harder than almost anyone I'd ever met.

How could someone capable of so much kindness also be capable of deception?

I couldn't make those pieces fit together.

Maybe that's because people are rarely all good or all bad.

Sometimes they're simply broken in ways we don't immediately understand.

So instead of trying to fix him...

I prayed.

"Lord, if he isn't mine, remove him from my heart."

Not from his marriage.

Not from his life.

From my heart.

Then I did something that felt impossible.

I stopped chasing answers.

I stopped trying to decode every silence.

I stopped searching for hidden meanings.

I left him alone.

For the first time since walking into that exotic car shop...

I wasn't asking God to change him.

I was asking Him to change me.

And little by little...

He did.