Husband

The porn is gone but, the memory lingers; he often stops and enjoys a sex scenario with strange women in public places and private intimacies. The husband wears the sex on his face as he leers and plunges his mental organ into the strange woman, while the wife stands witnessing the adultery among the racks of pyjama bottoms and bras. The wife can no longer rest in the belief of his innate goodness because she can no longer believe this lie; men of good character men do not have sex with other women in their minds at the grocery store. Do they?
He uses his mental porn to attack his wife when other men admire her beauty then attempts to pick up the conversation about children where it left off, inside another woman. The wife feels a knife being edged between her top two ribs, the same spot his mental infidelities stab her every time, the hole in her heart is evidence of these attacks. Always with the entire sordid affair playing across his face, the first years of the marriage yielded denials from the husband and then accusations of the wife's craziness but, that has eroded too and the husband no longer deflects or makes excuses, he only says "I know my inappropriate staring at other women hurts you"
It has dawned on the wife that all the information she needs about her marriage is contained in this statement; the husband knows exactly what he's doing; he will not stop. The wife's emotional well- being is irrelevant and takes a last place to his sexual game with strange women. It is too pleasurable a guilty sex to give up, in his rationalizations, its free and costs the husband nothing and remains firmly planted behind the line of bending trust and the climax muffles the breaking of yet another marriage for him. The dark, lonely and dank basement of his vice began an affair that seeded long ago in child hood deviance and spreads like a disease into this life with the second wife.
The wife is starting to realize that the marriage is a beard, a false pussy for the world to see, to hide his true love and deepest satisfaction which is to say, pathetic sex with strange women in the palm of his hand. The wife is starting to realize that her husband is a man of secrets and lies, duplicitous in nature and false in heart. The husbands a soul is void of much light, the darkness moved in and settled in that basement of porn and ugly sex; he is ruined. Damaged? The darkness that lurks inside him has scarred his character and taken his manhood, soiled with the many years of solitude in the basement, jerking off to waxed women.
Inadequate he is, inadequate he knows; a boy having sex with himself in the basement of his mothers' house, a dark and frightening place. The wife is learning his male heart holds darkness unfathomable to the other sex; this male organ seems to absorb the rancour with gusto. The hiding that follows years of secrets and shame lead back to the basement where he is both alone and lonely and it is all he has. The basement of secret sex and false cardboard intimacies marks his psyche with black spots and reinforces with an orgasmic return, the investment well worth what it costs: a marriage, two marriages, a wife loved dearly but devalued. The secret, protected, preserved, precious.
Loneliness is the most predatory of hunters; feral, hungry, violent and self-generating. The sinister lure of free sex without rejection and disappointment flickers like the moving pictures that hypnotize you. The shame is what shackles you to the secret and keeps you chained to the cell, the dungeon in the ground where you cry your lonely tears and beg simultaneously for forgiveness and help to break free.
Your' heart must be broken, Husband, just as you break mine.
The wife asks of the husband, over and over again: Will you stay in that grave in the basement or will you come up here, to the light, where I am?