The Ungoogleable in over whelmed...?

I just went through two boxes of old photos and it felt like taking a peek into someone else’s life. They are two boxes that I packed up and put away in like 2002 or 2003 and have not looked at since. They are more or less all the pictures of my relationship with my ex-husband. We were together for 8 years so that is a good chunk of time. We look so happy in the pictures but I am absolutely certain that we were not. My ex-husband is super dodgy. We fought all. the. time. ALL. THE. TIME. From the very beginning I think.

My former marriage is like a great mystery to me. My ex-husband is either an enigmatic genius or completely insane. And I will never know which. I find it some what infuriating that he has no web presence. I enjoy internet stalking immensely and he makes it impossible. Which of course makes him a bigger mystery, which makes me more curious. We have one mutual friend and he is one of those honorable, good people so he is shit at sharing gossip.

I was very very young the first time that I saw Tim. I was 17. I had just started University and just moved to Canada from Europe. I was very lonely. I felt almost exactly the same way here as I did in Canada. Like a fucking alien. Nobody dressed like I did, nobody talked about the things I wanted to talk about, nothing inspired me, it was ugly, and nobody fucking touches you in Canada. Anyway, much like here, I found a pretentious little bar on campus and made it my home for the next 6 years. It was the grad bar. I felt at home there drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and talking about art and philosophy. I took myself very seriously when I was younger. Anyway I had a brief fling with a very creepy grad student who eventually introduced me to Tim. Tim was 8 years older than me and working on his Masters degree. We clicked right away and he looked like Kirk Cobain. He had a girl friend. She was very glamorous. She wore all black and was beautiful and smart and edgy and a bitch. I was obsessed with both of them. They were to coolest people I had ever met. I would see them on campus after that and he would smile at me and she would basically hiss and I would run away.

Fast forward two years. I was 19 and working on campus for the summer, we was 27 and writing his dissertation. I had lunch at the grad bar, he was there by himself. He was still living with his super glamorous girlfriend. He asked me if I wanted to go out. I told him I would hang out if he waited 4 hours until I got off work. He waited. I told him that we were not going to hook up. 3 hours later we were making out in the stairway of the most grown up restaurant I had been to without my parents. I spent the night at his place because his glamazon was out of town. We had the a lot of really intense sex. (In retrospect this is all very sketchy. I always realized that the girlfriend part was sketchy but dude, I was 19! He was 27!!!)

This is pretty much when I gave up all control of my life and just went with it. This all happened in February. Two days into this he gets his best friend to come from Toronto so I can meet him, three days later he calls his girlfriend and tells her its over and he is with me now. Unbeknownst to me I went from having a steamy one night stand to being in a serious relationship in like 72 hours. I still don’t really understand how it all happened. Within weeks all of us had met all the parent’s, we got engaged at Christmas and married the following Summer.

It all sounds pretty good right!? Well not so much. We were both cheating on each other before we even got married. He I am pretty certain had a string of one night stands. I don’t know this for sure but I know. I had a pretty serious emotional affair with a girl named Gita and then I topped that with a serious physical and emotional affair with a close friend of his, who had a girl friend, and the four of us hung out together all the time. All of this before we got married. We fought. We fought a lot. I lost several close friends because they hated him. Right before we went to England to get married my closet friend told me that I didn’t have to go through with this. The morning of my wedding another friend called to ask me if I was sure I wanted to do this, lets name her the truthspeaker. I assume other people’s friends don’t do this. I took no heed of all of these obvious signs.

We got married and then got a roommate. We threw great parties. I went out every single night. Without him. When things were fun, they were really really fun but when things were bad they were really really bad. He dislocated his shoulder one night when he tried to punch me. I moved. And yet we still stayed together. We moved to New York. Sometimes I wonder if getting the fuck out of that town was why we got and stayed together. We had to get out of that town and we had to get to New York and together we pulled it off. We were both really good at getting shit done against all odds. Maybe I am as much a sociopath as he is.

We got divorced when we really couldn’t keep beating that dead horse. Up until the very end we had great parties. And we fought. And he cheated on me often and I turned a blind eye, consciously or unconsciously. I didn’t cheat on him again with a man but I had a string of fairly odd and intense relationships with women. I eventually caught him red handed cheating on me. In the aftermath I told him about my affair with his friend. Because that was mean and I knew that would hurt him more than anything else I could ever do or say. It was nasty. Of course none of these horrible things were the reason we broke up. We broke up because he became a believer of David Icke in the years following 9/11 and I could not deal with his shape shifting reptilian conspiracy theories. That’s right they aliens ruined my marriage. Not the lying or cheating.

He went on to marry a woman who looked exactly like me. They had two kids and then got divorced. The last time I saw him was two days before I left New York for good. It was odd. I gave him a penknife that was his. We talked for 10 minutes. I couldn’t believe how much I had loved him and for how long. It didn’t feel like that feeling could have ever been associated with him.

I don’t know why I am rehashing this shit here. There was more. There was so much more that people knew but did not tell me until after I left him. I found out that he had cheated his way into art school by using other people’s work. I found out that everybody except me knew about the affairs. We both did coke all the time but I found out that he was also on heroin for the last several years of our marriage. Turns out he also cheated on me with men, which explained a lot of mysterious friends that had come and gone from our lives. I found out so much. His fucking insane mother who used to steal my shit and harass us. So much shit that I could probably keep writing for days.

We look so happy in those pictures though. It looks real. Even to me and I was there.


Last updated February 05, 2016