The Last Letter I Wrote to You After Cheating on You

One bad day / everything turned into yesterday. / Your clear gaze, / your laughter against the pillow, / your hand every morning, / the sun split across your face, / the ticking of our alarm clock, / the coffee you brought me to bed, / your arms closing around me. / The streets beneath our feet, / the afternoons chasing after us, / your usual table, / the I love yous, the I want yous. / The silence where we slept, / the spark of plans, / our house, / the children I’m never going to have. / The warmth of your body, / your taste mingled with mine, / the brush of your fingers on my back, / the anniversary dance, / my tears in front of the altar. / The road for the two of us: / growing up, / breathing, / growing old. / Everything turned into yesterday.

***

For Tomás:

I’m writing you this letter because I haven’t found any other way to talk to you. To have you listen to me. I don’t want it to sound like a reproach, none of that. Even if I don’t want to, I completely understand your position. Some days I don’t want to be with myself either. But I don’t have the option of walking away from myself.

I can’t deny it’s been hard. Knowing you’re having such a bad time and not being able to do anything about it eats me alive. But I deserve it. I’ve already done enough damage to go around asking for comfort on top of that.

I’ve been looking for you. I think you noticed. You’ve got dozens of missed calls and messages from me that you don’t want to receive. You blocked me on every social network. You found a way so that not even an email gets through to you. And it’s killing me, because I need to talk to you. So I’m turning to this paper, hoping you won’t put it away for some tomorrow that never comes or, even worse, burn it as soon as you recognize my handwriting. I hope you read me. Even if now I have to settle for imagining that you hear me through these lines.

I owe you explanations, even if they’re useless now or you don’t believe me. To you I must be a liar who called the final stretch of what we had into question, or maybe the whole relationship. But first and foremost, I beg you to believe me. I’m speaking to you with the only truth I could gather by force of reliving what happened on that fucking trip. And I swear I’ll be honest, so honest that I’m going to tell you things I know you won’t want to hear. Because I wouldn’t want to say them either, or for them to be true. But the least I owe you is to speak to you face to face, however hard that may be. And I want you to know, though it may sound contradictory, that I never meant to hurt you. That I loved you all this time. More than I’m capable of loving myself now.

I still remember the night you asked me why. I had no face, no conscience, to give you a reason, just one reason why I threw myself into doing what I did.

Today I can see it a little more clearly. I’ve been writing a diary for the therapy I’m in. You can imagine how hard that is. It’s helped me sort out what I was feeling, which was pure darkness and weight. And I was able to locate the point where I started splitting in two, where the monster I ended up becoming was born. I could see how I emptied myself out, chasing something I thought would fill me and that, on the contrary, left me even hollower.

I’m telling you this not to justify myself, though any explanation of a mistake sounds like justification. I hope you understand me.

I can point to a key moment. The night I tried on the dresses for dinner and got home soaked by the rain, ashamed, with one too-tight dress stuck to my body. Do you remember? That’s when I started to feel seen, validated. As strange as it sounds, in the middle of humiliation a part of me lit up. The daring woman I had never dared to be, the other side of the usual shy girl, came to the surface. And that, I have to admit, I liked. I came home crying because of course it bothered me to feel like an object, meat to look at. But seeing myself as provocative made me believe I could control everything. And something in me got hooked on that.

Little by little I went on embracing that defiant version of myself. The trip became a mirror that magnified that image. That was arrogance. Stupid arrogance.

The other thing was sinking into the teenage dynamic of my old group of friends — now ex-friends, just so you know. I felt flattered many times. But stepping into their game, their rules, meant accepting another way of understanding relationships, couple boundaries, what was allowed. And I fell, again and again, into that logic that fit the daring Irene so well. And I lost sight of you. Forgive me for losing sight of you. If it helps, I lost myself too. Because feeling in control, having fun with stupid jokes, trying to fit in, I didn’t know how to put you first. I’m sorry. I truly am. It was only at the last dinner that I understood we would never fit into that group as a couple. That you couldn’t adapt to them. Nor could I entirely, with some women’s envy and others’ morbid curiosity. I should have understood that we were a team, and that if something made you uncomfortable, my duty was to avoid it.

I didn’t realize I was crossing, one by one, the lines of what was acceptable. It was a snowball effect. Each small decision was wearing me down, wearing down what we had. I didn’t stop in time, and when I looked back I had already left a trail of wreckage behind me.

And now, Tomás, comes the part I don’t want to write. The part that’s keeping you far away. I promised to be honest, and I will be, even if every word scrapes my throat raw. You need to know what happened that night in the hotel, in detail, because I know your imagination has been torturing you and maybe the truth, as brutal as it is, will free you, even a little. I also know it could sink you further. I couldn’t tell you which of the two is worse. But I owe it to you.

We had been drinking. A lot. You know I can’t hold my liquor, and that night I went too far. When we went up to the group suite, I was already dizzy, laughing at everything, in that short black dress you hadn’t liked. You had stayed in our room, tired, irritated by the elevator scene. You told me to come up if I wanted to, that you wouldn’t wait up. And I went up. That’s where it all started, in that yes I gave the group and the no I gave you.

He came up behind me in the suite kitchen while I was pouring myself another drink. He put a hand on my hip, like that, without preamble, as if he had every right. And instead of taking it away, Tomás, I didn’t take it away. That’s the ugliest truth. I didn’t take it away. I stood still, feeling his thumb run along my hip bone over the fabric, and part of me — that daring Irene, that idiot — thought I could handle it, that I could look him in the face and say enough whenever I wanted, and that until then nothing was happening. That nothing’s happening ruined my life.

His hand went higher. He touched my tits over the dress, squeezing them slowly, feeling the weight, as if measuring what belonged to him. My nipples hardened under the fabric and he laughed into my neck. He whispered that it showed, that he was going to fuck me the way you never fucked me, that he’d been thinking about it since he saw me in that dress in the elevator. And instead of slapping him, I leaned back against him. I felt his hard cock against my ass through his pants. And I didn’t move away. I leaned into him more. I rubbed against him. I let him slide his hand under my dress and touch me over my underwear. I was wet, Tomás. I was wet and he noticed and told me in my ear: look how soaked you are, slut. And I closed my eyes.

He took me into one of the rooms. Nobody else came in, but the door didn’t close all the way, and that crack was where the phone camera entered, the one half the world would later see. I didn’t know that until the next day. In that moment I only thought about how my head was spinning and how his mouth was biting my neck while he pulled my panties down from under the dress. He yanked them off my ankles and stuffed them in his pocket, laughing, like a trophy.

He shoved me against the dresser. He hiked the dress up to my waist and spread my legs with a gentle kick, forcing me to bend over the piece of furniture. I looked at myself in the mirror: my hair a mess, mascara smeared, the dress bunched up on my hip, my ass bare. That’s the image that wakes me up at three in the morning, Tomás. That woman in the mirror who looks like she’s enjoying what she shouldn’t.

He put his fingers in me first. Two, all at once, no care. And I moaned. I moaned, Tomás, I can’t lie to you. He was fucking me with his fingers while with the other hand he pulled my hair to force me to look at myself in the mirror, to make me see what I was letting him do. He was saying things in my ear: you’re a bitch, you always were, look at how you get wet for me, your boyfriend doesn’t touch you like this, does he?, say it, say it. And I shook my head but pressed my cunt against his fingers. That’s the shit I am. That’s the truth.

He pulled his pants down. I heard the belt, the rustle of the condom wrapper — at least that, at least that crumb of sanity I kept: making him put one on. And he shoved his cock into me from behind, in one thrust. His cock forced its way into my cunt and I covered my mouth with my hand so I wouldn’t scream, because deep down, in a corner of me that was still breathing, I knew I was doing the worst thing I had ever done in my life. But I didn’t tell him to stop. He drove me against the dresser with every thrust, the wood hitting my hips, and he fucked me with a rage I don’t know if it was desire or revenge against you, against the years he couldn’t have me.

He fucked me hard. Very hard. With both hands on my hips, yanking me back to drive it into me to the hilt, to make it hurt, and I let him. The sound of skin against skin filled the room, and his grunts, and my gasps that I couldn’t control. He made me say things. He made me say I was his slut that night, and I said it. He made me ask him to fuck me harder, and I asked. He made me say your name and say that yours was smaller, and there, thank God, something in me broke and I refused. That was the only line I didn’t cross. And even so I crossed all the others.

He turned me around. He sat me on the dresser and spread my legs and shoved it into me from the front again, holding me under the thighs, looking me in the eyes. He kissed me on the mouth and I kissed him back, Tomás. I kissed him back with tongue while his cock went in and out of my cunt. He bit my lips, ripped the dress off me with one yank from above to leave my tits bare, and sucked on them, nibbled my nipples, while he kept hammering into me. My legs were hooked around his ass, pushing him toward me. Pushing him toward me, understand? I was helping him fuck me.

He made me get down from the dresser and kneel. He took off the condom. He grabbed my hair with both hands and shoved his cock into my mouth. I sucked him. I sucked him, Tomás. I opened my mouth and let him push it all the way in, until tears sprang to my eyes and my mascara ran even more and I filled his cock with saliva. He was fucking my mouth the way he had fucked my cunt, mercilessly, and I looked up at him with watery eyes and he smiled. He smiled like a winner. I sucked him off eagerly. There’s no other way to say it. I ran my tongue around the head, sucked him underneath, licked his balls when he asked me to. I did everything he told me.

He came on my face. He held my head with one hand and with the other he jerked his cock against my cheeks, my mouth, my chin. His cum ran down my chin to my chest, hot, thick, and I stuck out my tongue because he ordered me to. He told me to open my mouth and show him. I showed him. He laughed. And that laugh, Tomás, that satisfied laugh of having reduced me to that, is what the hallway camera recorded. That laugh, and me on my knees, with his load dripping from my chin, with the torn dress hanging from my waist, looking at him as if he’d done me a favor. That’s the video. That’s the video you saw.

And there’s still more, and I need to tell you even if you despise me twice as much. Because I didn’t get up and leave. I stayed. He took me to the bed, laid me on my back, opened my legs, and with his semen still on my face he ate my cunt. He ate me until I came, until I screamed into the pillow, until I pulled his hair and dug my heels into his back. I came in his mouth, Tomás. I came with another man’s mouth between my legs while you slept two floors below waiting for me. That guilt can’t be washed away with any letter. I know that.

And after that he fucked me again. Again. In missionary, looking me in the eyes, without a condom this time because I didn’t say anything anymore. He came inside me. I felt the hot stream fill me and I closed my eyes and thought — that broken I was — that for years you hadn’t come inside me without care, and that stupid comparison cut through me like a knife the next day when I woke up with another woman’s panties in my bag and my cunt swollen and his smell all over my skin.

I left that room at dawn, naked beneath the torn dress I held together with my hands, trying to make it to the elevator without anyone seeing me. And in the lobby one of the girls from the group — you know which one — was there with her phone in her hand, filming me too, laughing. That’s the second video. The lobby one. The face I had when I got there. Everyone understood when they saw it what had happened upstairs. Everyone except me, who was still repeating to myself that it wasn’t that bad, that I could go back to our room and get in the shower and erase it, that you didn’t have to find out. How naïve. How disgustingly naïve.

That’s it. I wrote it all down. You don’t know how many times I set the pen down before finishing that paragraph. But you needed to know it in words, not from the cut-up images of a badly framed video. You needed to know it wasn’t a stolen kiss, that it wasn’t a moment, that it wasn’t a one-minute impulse. It was the whole night. It was everything. And it was me, with my whole body, who said yes at every step, even if I lie to myself saying I was drunk, that he insisted, that the daring Irene devoured your Irene. All that is excuses. The only truth is that I was there, all of me, and I didn’t leave.

I didn’t realize I was crossing, one by one, the lines of what was acceptable, and now I see it with a clarity that makes me nauseous. It was arrogant blindness. Dazzled by a sea of new sensations — or old ones brought back to life — I stopped seeing. In my eagerness not to feel empty, not to go without approval, ironically I kept hollowing myself out. What I was supposed to protect — you, what we had, and in the end myself, my values — was undermined on its own. I didn’t know how to take care of our love. I even came to think something was wrong with me. That’s exactly what I’m working on in therapy, I promise you.

It never crossed my mind that someone might get between us. My trust in the world was misplaced and it made me naïve. I told myself many times that I was just having fun, that it was a safe space… while deliberately erasing the possibility of danger.

That emptiness I’m talking about was being filled with compliments, approval, little challenges. But it didn’t fill anything. It only emptied me more. When everything exploded, when I saw myself reflected in your eyes, that version of me I thought was powerful, daring, intelligent turned out to have no support at all. I had built virtues on nothing, on a floor of lies I’d told myself. I didn’t want to be a piece of meat. I never wanted that. And yet I walked straight toward it. I knelt for it. I opened my legs for it.

I regret everything. I swear it. You know it’s true. I’m sorry I ruined what we had. If I’m telling you all this it’s so you can see that I’m at least trying to give answers, even if maybe I’ll never fully understand it myself. Because when people do things, too many threads get tangled together: our history, the circumstances, the others, decisions that seem tiny and push you to a point of no return. But you wanted to know why. And I know you wanted to know whether I played with you, whether it was all a calculated joke, whether there was any intention behind it. There wasn’t. I never imagined that trip would end like that. I would never have wanted that for you, for me, for us. I truly loved you. I have loved you. And it hurts me to carry this pain: the pain of having hurt you this way.

I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness, that maybe you’ll never be able to forgive me. But I have to forgive myself, Tomás. I have to keep going with my life somehow. Stop feeling like the air is suffocating me, like every morning only announces another shitty day. I need to find a way to live again. That’s it: live. And for that I have to forgive myself and, I confess, I don’t want to. Because I don’t think I deserve it either.

But I have to.

These days, these weeks, I’ve been doing very badly. When I went back to our apartment and didn’t find you there, I felt completely empty. All at once I lost my bearings. I was alone. Broken. Unable to talk to anyone without dying of shame. I looked for you in a thousand ways. Above all, I wanted to know how you were. I couldn’t bear the idea that something might happen to you. A black cloud covered me completely.

I can’t sleep properly anymore. I wake up in the middle of the night remembering the night you confronted me. Your sad eyes, full of tears, haunt me in my dreams. Sometimes I don’t even know whether I’m dreaming asleep or awake; the boundary becomes blurred. I wish all of this were a nightmare I could wake from to go on with our life. It’s so hard to accept a reality one refuses to accept. I’ve had to take sleeping pills. They work for a few hours, but they leave me numb during the day.

And sometimes — I’m telling you because I promised not to keep anything else from you — my sleep turns dirty. I dream about us. I dream of you walking through the door, throwing me onto the bed, ripping off my clothes in a rage, fucking me as punishment, marking me again as yours. I dream of your cock, Tomás, of your mouth on my neck, of the exact way you used to spread my legs on Sunday mornings and make love to me without hurry. I wake up soaked and crying, with my hand between my legs, hating myself for still wanting you like that, for still wanting you to touch me after everything. It’s another form of punishment: wanting you and knowing never again.

At work they ask me about my vacation. Everyone does. The family. Acquaintances. I’ve had to lie with a fake smile; they don’t know that every question opens me up inside. I suppose I deserve it, but I still end up hiding in the bathroom to cry. It’s torture having to relive it. At times I just want to rest from this. To feel, for one minute, that it never happened.

The other day I passed by our usual restaurant and ordered that fruit dessert we liked so much, to eat at home. Do you remember? I couldn’t even take one bite. I don’t know why, but pleasurable things lost their taste, their smell. Or maybe I’m punishing myself and won’t let myself enjoy them. I spent a couple of afternoons summoning the courage to try it. I couldn’t. I ended up throwing it away… it rotted on the table.

Too many things in this room remind me of you. Especially your pillow, which is already losing your smell, or maybe it has already lost it and I don’t want to accept it. A few days ago I buried my face in it and felt ridiculous and disappointed to discover that your smell had abandoned me too. I’ve wanted to cling to you in a thousand ways: with the toothbrush you left, with your coffee mug, the photos, your side of the couch, your favorite music. There are too many things anchored to your memory. I’ve fantasized that one day you’ll walk through the door and this hell will be over. I suppose I’m still entitled to dream.

I’ve wanted to hold on despite my therapist insisting I have to learn to let go, to live through the mourning. She tells me clinging to your things is clinging to the pain, that I won’t heal if I don’t accept that you’re gone. But it’s so hard for me to get rid of you. Your whole memory rests in these walls.

Part of me knows I have to let you go, the rational part. The one that understands there’s no going back from this, even if you wanted to — and you don’t, I know. But there’s another part that resists with all the strength of sleepless nights, of the pain that floods me the moment I say your name. That part clings to these walls as if they were our life together. As if leaving the apartment were, somehow, the same as stopping hoping that one day you’ll open the door.

Not every day is bad. There are days when I manage to go an hour without thinking of you. And others, most of them, you’re the name I wake up with. You’re more present than ever. Just now, when you’re the one who left! I suppose absence makes your presence hit harder. I’m starting to believe many of our processes carry this ambivalence. Because when I had you beside me I didn’t know how to see you, and now that I can’t see you, you won’t leave me alone.

Sometimes I daydream. It’s more of a silly wish, or a very deep one. That in some five years, ten, we cross paths in some park by sheer chance and there are no hard feelings left, that you’re happy, that I see you smile, and that I finally know this is over. That you’ve forgiven me already.

And there are even deeper longings. Like that I never leave the room and go with you, and I’m planning the wedding, choosing the dress, the venue, the flowers, the music, all those things that made me so excited. For a second, Tomás, I forget everything. I don’t remember the trip, or the hotel, or the recording, or the lobby. I only remember that I loved you and that I was going to marry you. It was a moment of peace. One that came and went as soon as memory cleared the fog I live in.

But that second existed. I was able to feel that fleeting peace. And it exists now, while I’m writing to you. I close my eyes and there you are, before all of this. There you are putting on your coat before leaving for work, turning off the alarm so you won’t wake me up — I always noticed when you turned it off; there are the movie afternoons, the cheap celebration wine that made me know you truly loved me. Let me stop there, please, that night when I stared at you waiting for the proud sermon, and instead you flooded the room with your loving eyes and with three words that filled me in a way I didn’t know before. That Tomás is still alive somewhere in me, and I don’t want to erase him. I can’t. It’s the only good thing I have left.

And let me also stop once more at how you touched me. Because that memory is mine too and no one is taking it from me, not even myself. How you undressed me slowly, button by button, kissing every inch of skin you uncovered. How you opened my legs with both hands and looked at my cunt as if it were an altar, not a piece of meat. How you made love to me with your forehead pressed to mine, whispering that you loved me as you moved inside me. How you came with me, always with me, never before. No one has ever fucked me the way you made love to me. No one. And I want you to know that too, even if it hurts, even if it’s useless. That cock that slept beside me was the only one my body recognized as its own. The rest was noise and humiliation. Yours was home.

I know you’re not coming back. I know I shouldn’t ask you to. But I need you to know that in another life, in another version of this story, I would never have left our room. Or I would have left earlier. Or I would have asked for your help from the hallway. And you would have saved me. And today we would be arguing about our children’s names.

Forgive me if I sound corny. But it feels good.

When I write your name, for an instant I can live in that different reality. And that’s okay, in that place I’m not hurting anyone. There I can keep loving you without hurting you any more.

I don’t want to finish this letter. It’s just that I can feel you here while I write it, in the tremor of my fingers, in the heat of my hand. And I know finishing it is another way of ending our story, the one that on one bad day turned into yesterday. But let me have a little more time. Let me feel you one more time. Every letter that goes toward you carries a bit of the love I had for you, and I hope you take it that way. Because I’ve felt, for a moment, that the love we had for each other rests here too, the love you had for me.

That’s it. I have to finish. I don’t want to.

With love:

your Irene

P.S. The bills got ahead of me. I can’t pay the apartment anymore. I also can’t keep living in this city. It’s so hard to know that my mere presence hurts you, that even the air hurts me. I asked for a transfer at work. I’m going to pack up the rest of your things and, if you don’t want to come get them, don’t worry: I’ll leave them with Daniel.

***

Tomás finished reading the letter in tears. He knew where to find it.