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**6 months ago**

Dear you,

I can’t breathe. I feel so lonely as if everyone around me goes on and on with their life but here I am, just standing by myself in a marriage I don’t want anymore. Sam is far from the husband I wish he was. To tell you the truth, I wish he was someone else and over the years I realized that time doesn’t fix anything, it just makes it worst.

How can it feel this wrong? I keep asking myself, why and how did I get here? Hoping for some kind of sign I never got, I married Sam in the hopes that time would heal my feelings for him. I was never in love with him but I somehow convinced myself that passion is not everything and I could move on without it. I could have a stable and loving relationship without the intensity passion brings.

As I took several deep breaths and a couple years later I realized how much I was wrong. Having kids, a house, a marriage, it’s not enough when you do not love your husband. Actually, it makes everything worse. Anything that Sam does wrong is like amplified by a 1000 because I don’t have that love for him that would soften the gravity of the problem.

So we fight all the time, for silly things because I just don’t love him. At first, our fights were one sided, I was freaking out but he may have had that love for me that made taking my freak outs easier for him. After several months though, I could see that love leave his eyes when he got angry; I cannot blame him for it because there was always that other person that made it impossible for Sam to reach me. Reach my heart.

I need to leave this marriage, I have decided weeks ago I was going to but I don’t know how. I mean we have the bar and my house. I don’t want to lose either. My house is all that I have left. Sam could really hurt me here. And our friends, how do you tell people that your marriage is just not working? I would be cast away to hell, breaking the most sacred vows of all.

I don’t want to be on the street, I don’t want to have to find a new job and new friends because we work at the same place and because we share the same one. The truth is that I am comfortable in my own misery and leaving it behind is a huge leap of faith I am not sure I am ready for.

Do I want to be alone? For the rest of my life I mean? Because believe me when I say, Eric will be the only one I will ever love and I do not want to make the same mistake again. So am I really ready to come home to an empty house, to have dinner by myself, to have all the chores just for me? Am I ready to have miserable days and have no one to talk to about it because most of my friends will have lives of their own while I stayed behind waiting?

Because that is exactly what I would be sentencing myself to do, waiting forever, unable to break from the past. I would be on stand still, hanging on to my fading memories. If I cannot be with him, I would rather be alone I tell myself, but it is a high price for having made one mistake.

Am I truly ready to leave all this behind?

Maybe I should reach out to Eric. I mean sure I am not allowed to see him but surely there is a way I could send him a letter or something? What if he doesn’t even want me? Does it change how I feel about Sam? About my life? Does it change my forever waiting?……NO, it does not.

I mean I am not happy, I know that, being with Eric or not, it doesn’t change that I am not happy with Sam. Besides, there is no guarantee even If I reach out and he writes back to me that he is still interested. Maybe Eric is angry with me? Or maybe he just plainly doesn’t give a crap.

I always wondered why he was attracted to me. This is a man who can have whoever he wants with just a snap of his fingers. Why would he care about the little southern belle who only gives him trouble in the first place? He has all the reasons in the world to hate me; I would if I was him.

I feel my heart aching at that very thought. I believe what we have was real and I can only hope it is fixable, but really I won’t know unless I try. I wish I could just see into the future sometimes, it would make making decisions a lot easier.

At the end of the day, I have two problems, one is my marriage, the other is the love of my life that I have lost and might never get back. Oddly enough, the two issues here are not related. The bottom line is clear to me now, I do not love Sam and I cannot continue like this. I have to leave him no matter the cost because I will be happier alone… eventually OR I can only hope. I don’t want to just live. I want to experience it, feel it and I want true love. I can’t do any of it in this marriage. But most of all, I want to be able to hope again. It doesn’t matter for what, I just want to be able to look forward and hope for something to come. I don’t want to live in an in-between, barely breathing, just to exist life.

It doesn’t matter how I feel about Eric, I need to leave Sam. I will take my time but it has to be sooner than later, I need to figure out how I am going to get a divorce and how I will live without my marriage but eventually maybe, learn to live without Eric.

Sookie