a house is not a home...

i made it to chicago and back...and did not loose my mind in the process. 

...thank heaven for little victories. 

I'm actually not certain what i felt when I walked into the house: relief? sadness? freedom? confusion? some where tied up in all those emotions is what i was feeling. 

as the cab rounded the corner onto my street, i was trying pinpoint exactly what emotion i was feeling. whatever it was, it was not the one i was expecting. 

I had been expecting to feel the bottom fall out, much like the feeling when you go over a hill in a roller coaster. i was waiting for that...but for all my thoughts about the situation, my stomach did not fall out and as we approached the house i was anxious. perhaps to get it over with, to kill the ghost, to get it done. Nothing I could think of at the present time was going to be as difficult as walking into the house, but i only had to do it once and once i did it...it was done. There were no more mysteries, no more wandering WHAT...just a lot of figuring out WHAT IS. 

the house looked remarkably similar for having lost 50% of it's residents. Smash had mentioned in the EMAIL he wrote me to let me know he HAD ALREADY moved out, that he had left a few things that we had bought "for the house". I walked into the house and the living room looked pretty much as i had left it, albeit missing the TV in the corner. 

So i did was any intelligent girl does...stopped, poured myself a glass of wine and then went looking to see what everything looked like. 

the back room, which had been Smash's studio, was pretty much completely empty. That was hard to take. the bookshelf in the bedroom was gone as well. I did take a moment to pause at the somewhat ridiculousness that he took the time to take the IKEA bookshelf down and apart to take...but not other stuff. but all of that is neither here nor there. 

i walked around for awhile and looked at everything, waiting and pausing and taking stock in my emotions. I was sad, which was undeniable. This was the first physical and tangible sign of the new life I am going to be leading and no matter how much i've been humiliated or how much this is a positive step in my life...it's also hard to see an empty room.  I started thinking about things i had in the basement that i could bring up to fill up the room and make it look more whole.

it turns out that i have a whole room's worth of spare possessions, which i brought up from the basement and staged in the room. I bought a rug, it really tied the room together. 

i also kept at the front of my mind the type of person it turns out i am dealing with. This is a person who openly cheated on me and secretly humiliated me, who hid truths from me and lied to my face. This is a person who attempted to turn around any time he's been questioned about ANYTHING into an assault on me. I tried to remind myself that I will be happier, that happiness is a choice and that is what i am choosing. 

and then i called my mom. I cried a bit at that point, but overall, i could not get over that i felt "free" free from having to worry WHAT he was going and to whom. Where he was, why he was lying, what the truth was. Free to not worry about him and not to feel inadequate because i did not anticipate his move. 

i realized that, no matter how sad i was, that the nights of me crying myself to sleep because the man that i loved wouldn't touch me in bed or didn't notice the efforts i put in to attempt to make him happy. Days of being nervous from when he got home, not knowing what his mood was going to be and knowing that my feelings would be hurt when he ignored me. all the having to make excuses for him or telling my family and friends "half truths" about both his care of me and grammatical and spelling atrocities, well...that stuff would be over. 

i wouldn't have to wonder if he was contacting fetish porn websites or "chicks with dicks" on craigslist, because it's no longer my issue or feel guilty about asking him to buy dinner...

because these are no longer my problems. 

It does NOT make it hurt less. I'm still putting this all back together and figuring out what personal happiness and letting go mean for ME...and there are still battles to be had and tears to be shed...

but i'm free.