I am currently counting down the days (nearing 5) until I leave Oklahoma, my husband, and my favorite cat to go back home to Virginia, where I belong. It’s been a long time coming. Nine years, in fact, ever since I was transplanted in this state where I’ve had no family and no friends of substance. To say I have been lonely is a misnomer. I’ve been deeply depressed and suicidal for the majority of my time here. But when you think you love someone and they want something badly, you try to comply, no matter how it will affect you, and my husband wanted to move home to Oklahoma after living with me in Virginia for nearly 4 years.
I am realizing the error of my ways. I was never completely IN love with my husband. Oh I have loved him and in some ways I still do, but to be IN LOVE and TO LOVE are totally different things. I love him as a friend and companion, and really, in the last 4 years, that is all our marriage has been and even in the last two years, there has been zero intimacy. I figure if I am no longer invested in my marriage, I should no longer be invested in living in a state where I have never felt welcomed.
So yes, I am going home… home to my beloved Virginia mountains and beaches… home to my family and friends… where I will feel wanted and loved. I have needed this for so long. My health has suffered greatly in Oklahoma: constant lethargy due to depression, major depression, suicidal attempts, cancer, major aches over 80% of my body. And most of that I attribute to stress and anxiety, even the cancer.
I am not saying that there will never be stress in Virginia. Some friends will stress me out, of this I am sure. Some family will also stress me out. BUT, the stress I will get from them will be nothing like the stress I endured living with my husband. Our marriage has been volatile, sometimes physically, but mostly mentally and emotionally. I will have emotional scars for a very long time. Things have been said to me during heated arguments that no man should say to a woman, EVER. I’ve had accusations thrown at me that have cut me so deeply I’ve felt like I’ve bled out. I have pleaded and begged for his forgiveness for things that were never even my fault. He has been a hard man to live with. He lives in HIS WORLD and anyone who violates his world and wrongs him is subjected to an emotional and sometimes physical tirade. And it hasn’t even always been directed at me. I have watched him smash two computers (one an older computer, one a brand new laptop) because they did not perform to his expectations.
I return home drained, exhausted, shaken and a former shell of the woman I was when I left Virginia in 2005. I only pray that I will regain my health, my emotional well-being and my vibrancy once more.
As the Fates Would Have It 