Something happened this morning that has distracted me from everything else I was talking about in this blog. Maybe I\u2019m blowing it all out of proportion. But I\u2019m scared, and I need advice.<\/p>\n
I got up before the rest of my family to check lab results on one of my patients. The first warning sign was the half-full coffee mug on my desk. I should say “our” desk. Our apartment is so small my husband and I have to share one, and we both use the old desktop computer there. But he — let’s call him “Charlie ” — is extremely tidy, so it usually works OK.<\/p>\n
Then as soon as I pulled out the keyboard tray, the machine hummed out of its hibernation. Charlie had stayed working late when I went to sleep, and evidently he had gone to bed thinking the computer was off. The screen lit up to reveal a Hotmail account I didn\u2019t even know he had. And the message in the center of the screen read, \u201cGoodnight, Bigbear.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a moment, I tried to believe this message was only internet flotsam that had drifted across the screen before Charlie went to bed. But when I checked the history window in the browser, I found that Charlie had been on Hotmail all night, apparently sending and receiving message after message.<\/p>\n
With Charlie still asleep and spiders creeping up my spine, I hit the “back” button. I got a password request. I tried the one Charlie uses for Amazon and similar services. Nothing. Almost giving up, I typed \u201cconnect.\u201d It\u2019s a word Charlie throws around a lot, not in reference to computers, but people, as in \u201cHoney, please connect with me a moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
I got in.<\/p>\n
There was an entire screen of messages from 2dance and, except for several obvious pieces of spam, no messages from anyone else. I hunted through them, more and more frantically, reconstructing the history of their correspondence.<\/p>\n
Bigbear: \u201cI\u2019ve never responded to one of these before, but this time I couldn\u2019t resist\u2026. I love that you dance and that you teach others, that you read poetry to children, that you crossed the Atlantic by ship\u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n
2dance: \u201cWhere are you? Is it nighttime there? You don\u2019t tell me much, but I see you in my mind. On your head is a fedora. You stand beneath a streetlamp, to light a cigarette. Then fog comes in.”<\/p>\n
There were dozens more like that, exchanged over the past couple of weeks. I wanted to wake Charlie up right away, to make him explain, to scream, to scratch his face, to throw this coffee mug at his sleeping head. But a voice inside me said that nothing here was a surprise, that the text in front of me only confirmed what I\u2019d known since I was a teenager.<\/p>\n
That sooner or later, in one way or another, all marriages fail.<\/p>\n
What should I do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Something happened this morning that has distracted me from everything else I was talking about in this blog. Maybe I\u2019m blowing it all out of proportion. But I\u2019m scared, and I need advice. I got up before the rest of my family to check lab results on one of my patients. The first warning sign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14,25,26,21,22],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adrienne","tag-group-marriage","tag-internet-affair","tag-polyamor-novel","tag-polyamorous","tag-polyamory-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":42,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":660,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions\/660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lairdharrison.com\/fallenlake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}