The Texts I Deleted

I have written him a thousand messages. I have sent none of them. The delete key is doing more for my mental health than any therapist ever has.

They come at night. Obviously. Because night is when the grey rock cracks and the real feelings push through like weeds through concrete. Rage. Grief. The desperate, pointless need to be understood by someone who will never understand because understanding would require him to see himself and that is the one thing he has spent his entire life avoiding.

I type them in the notes app now. Not even in the message thread. Because once I typed one in the thread and my thumb hovered over send and the only thing that stopped me was the dog stepping on my foot and breaking the trance.

The dog saved me from sending a seven-paragraph essay about financial abuse to a man who would have screenshot it and shown everyone as proof that I’m unhinged.

So I type in notes. And it’s worse, in a way, because they’re good. The messages are good. They’re precise and devastating and every word is true and they would land like a bomb in the careful little narrative he’s built about our marriage and my departure and his innocence.

But that’s exactly why I can’t send them. Because he doesn’t want the truth. He wants a reaction. Any reaction. Positive or negative. An emotion he can harvest and use. A crack in the grey rock he can point at and say see, she’s still not over it.

I’m not over it. I’ll probably never be over it. You don’t get over thirteen years. You get through them. You get past them. You get to the other side of them where the air is cleaner but the scars are permanent.

But he doesn’t get to know that.

So I type. And I read it back. And I feel the weight of it lift just enough to breathe. And then I select all and I press delete and the words disappear and the screen is blank and I am grey rock again.

Noted. The children will be ready at 10.

That’s what he gets. The beige. The nothing. The four-word sentence that cost me twenty minutes and three deleted drafts and the entire contents of my chest.

One day I’ll stop writing them. One day the notes app will be empty and the night will be quiet and his name won’t make my thumb itch.

Not today.

But one day.