Roman, your poem is beautiful. I am exactly the same as you - I literally can only write when I feel distressed and full of grief. That's why two of my very 'best' poems were written just days and weeks after D-Day. They almost seemed to write themselves, as my heart spilled out its contents.
You obviously still feel a great deal of heartache and agony about the loss of your wife. Even though I am still married - still in fact, living with my husband (who swears he will never leave me and that he doesn't WANT to leave me), I understand so well what you meant when you said it would not have been 'her' lying next to you in bed. Every single night I lie next to a person who looks like the man I married twenty years ago, who sounds like him, feels like him, smells like him - but who is a complete stranger. The barriers between us are getting higher everyday, and I ache, I yearn, I scream out to get back that man I knew and loved - and still do love so much. But I have this horrible, frightening, soul-destroying feeling that even if/when he gives up his OW, however much I continue to love him, however much he may continue to love me (he tells me he still does) that I will never again get back that man I knew. Have you heard the lines from someone called John Gottmann about adultery? He says,
'I liken an affair to the shattering of a Waterford crystal vase. You can glue it back together, but it will never be the same again.'
That is so true. I am in the process now of trying to scrape up all the millions of shattered fragments of the vase my husband has broken, and then, if he ends his affair, I will try the even more difficult task of desperately trying to stick those pieces together again so as to make up a vase which at least looks something like it used to do.
I always enjoyed jigaw puzzles. But I have the awful feeling this one might prove too much for me.
God bless - and keep writing and posting. It helps - a little.
Stilltrusting
