I've No Business Reading Love Stories...
And Medium is chock full of warm and fuzzy, vomit inducing, love stories.
As many of you are aware, and the rest of you should be, I post on Medium, both as myself, and the Ask A Bitchface long form columns, in an effort to showcase some of the more well received stories. This is not new news, I’ve been there for nearly 3 years.
In the early days there, Medium was where I went to put the horribly dark parts of my heart to rest. All the things that tormented me, all the scars that wouldn’t heal, they have a space somewhere on Medium, somewhere I left them behind because they were simply too much to carry.
Now, I focus on a few publications to work on my readership. I try to post my more political columns, and it is rare for me to visit any of the old relationship columns I wrote. I know better than to look at the Andy stories, they can fucking rewrite the algorithm and I’m still not reading those again.
Despite knowing that I dropped so many sordid parts of myself and my past in those very same pages, I visit there every day when I get my morning digest. I traipse around, looking at some seemingly innocuous titles other writers have christened the final edit, telling myself it can’t possibly be disguising some tale of heartache and pain.
It is. It always is.
I did the same thing this morning. I found myself in a rabbit hole that talked of husbands cheating, husbands lying, husbands leaving without so much as a simple wave as he went out the door.
Fuckers.
To alleviate the heavy heart these stories always cause, I head right on over to Murder Town and read of wives who aren’t taking this shit anymore. Now that cheating husband is a bag of fucking bones, and I’m willing to bet he isn’t so attractive to his younger, single subordinates now, is he?
Nope. Just a fucking bag of bones, same as 5 minutes ago.
I have told my own story of catching a husband cheating on me, in our home. Of very nearly killing both of them. And the fact that I will never allow myself to love anyone that way again. I almost traded my soul for the way I felt for him. I almost packed my bag for purgatory on that overcast day in September.
No matter how often I say I’m not going back to read the struggles of these other wives, these other ex-wives, these other now single women, I still do. I do it every day. It’s like I’m updating the Rolodex of the single women who do what I do for a living. We’re a community we didn’t know we had become, but who would want to chair that committee?
Fuck it, I’ll do it.
I can tell you whose husband cheated, who writes only stories of her second marriage because the first one ended in him committing suicide. I can tell you who has children that chose to live with their father. I can tell you all the sordid details, because I’ve read them all, committing these women and their tales of heartache to some recess in my memory.
Of course, that made me wonder, am I a saga to someone? Have I been read while someone had their morning coffee and shook their head at the way my ex completely destroyed me? Have I been the cautionary tale in adultery, the “don’t do as she did, he left her”, story?
Probably so. More than likely, yes. That I’m okay, nearly comfortable with it speaks to how long I’ve been doing this.
I come to you and tell you my stories. I tell you everything on my mind, and everything in my heart, and I ask you to read it, and I beg for your acceptance. I’m a writer, it’s what I do.
I no longer feel the attachment to the story itself; it’s words on a page now. Instead, I am attached to the reaction of my readers. I’m waiting for the “you handled that with class”, and the “you really didn’t deserve that”, because it allows me to file it away under “Finished” or “Printed”, and not “Crippling”.
It means I can read it like a column, instead of tell it like a moment in time that I was injured by someone I thought was there to protect me. I was cut the deepest by those who swore they would never wield the knife.
I wonder if all the ladies who write in the same publications I do feel like this. Like it’s closure. Like it’s the final chapter in a story that never seemed as though it would end, until it did.
Perhaps I’ll write a column and ask them that. This one, though, this one is for the “Printed” file. It touches a couple of things I never want to speak of again.
I’ll be filing if anyone needs me. I don’t want to leave this shit lying around.