The Truth, Your Honour

'Still Life: Fish' by William Merritt Chase, 1901

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“What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything,” he said.

I lose track of how long it was until I finally plucked up the courage to ask him the question that received that response: “Can you please just tell me the truth?”

I hadn’t been able to sit with the not-knowing as the years went on, like I was endlessly searching through an overcrowded graveyard to lay flowers on a headstone with no name. I wondered how many people on earth did know the truth — other than her.

Whoever her was.

I’d already heard a curated version of events that took him roughly eight hours, thirty-seven minutes and twenty-four seconds to come up with, as he regaled it to me apologetically. A stranger. Bar. Hotel room. Alone. Hotel room.

But over time, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. What would be worse than that? What’s worse than a stranger in a bar whose hotel room you end up in?

Not a stranger. Someone I knew.

So, as the years went on, it ate me up. I just wanted to know the truth, whatever that was.

The salt in the wound was that, after we separated, he erased this part of the story entirely and fell back onto a previous trial separation we’d had earlier that year — which hadn’t actually changed anything other than him moving into a different part of the house and coming home later and later at night. The one where I had spent a long and painful time trying to figure out why we couldn’t just make things work.

What is the problem?

What is the problem?

What is the problem?

Over and over again.

I had spent years prior to this unravelling checking his pockets for receipts, any evidence that something was awry. I rarely found anything, although I remember one occasion where I discovered a receipt for a bar bill — for two drinks. When I confronted him about it, he said, “I was embarrassed to tell you. I thought you would think it was sad that I was at a bar drinking on my own.”

I know.

Same man who called his ‘side crush’ from his phone while we were away and I was in the bathroom — which I discovered when I needed to ‘borrow’ his phone upon my return (I actually wanted to check because I felt something was off). Before he could make any excuse, I took it out of his hand, smiled, and said thanks. The smile didn’t last long.

“Why the fuck have you just called X?”

His response?

Without laughing, he managed to say, “There are just some numbers in my phone that my phone rings all by itself.”

When I told that to our therapist, she actually gasped. Although she wasn’t our therapist for long — not just because he was there in body but not in spirit — but also, which brings me back round to where we began, because when we had this trial separation, it was because of my sexuality. Or perceived sexuality, as time has gone on and I understand it differently now.

He had always known that I considered myself bisexual, in that I found men and women attractive, but I had never had a relationship or slept with a woman. Kissed many, yes. Women. Are. Awesome.

But I’d never met one where the feeling was mutual. It never unfolded in the universe that way, so I’d never explored it fully.

Then one night, during this brief trial separation, he said to me, “You know, if it were because of that — that you just prefer women — I could deal with that.” With hindsight, it planted a seed. Although at the time I really, truly — after many weeks of ruminating — thought that must be it.

So one night, as I waited for him to come home, feeling like absolute shit inside and thinking I was the worst person ever, I decided to tell him as such. I sobbed on the bed for hours, and he was ever so kind, rubbed my back, told me it was okay.

I woke up the next morning and everything felt completely different — we were friends, and I felt like I was no longer unconscious. Everything seemed fine until it wasn’t. Suddenly he was angry about it. That I had hidden something from him somehow. Made a show of him, somehow. He started talking to other people about it.

Somehow, we worked through it. I say somehow, but I think his anger, and the fact he was talking to other people about it, caused me to fawn and we reignited.

We had seemed momentarily happy, talking about moving away somewhere, starting afresh, and I even brought up marriage — the thing that I had always asked him (and he had happily agreed) never to ask me.

If I hadn’t contracted an STI — perfectly timed with us having sex only days before, for the first time in what he would probably recall as five hundred years — would he have come back from one of his many lads’ holidays and talked some more about a house by the sea and that fresh start? I never found out. And I never found out the truth either.

I had to endure, after that event and our then inevitable separation, him telling all of his (ours, over time) friends that it was all over because I was gay.

I only found this out after meeting up with said old friends on a night out and them both asking me, at the same time, if it were true. I said he always knew I was bisexual, but that’s not why we weren’t together.

But inside it fucking cut me. I felt so exposed, like a plaything for gossip. Like I’d had my clothes ripped off in the town square.

I got more drunk that night than I care to remember. I sobbed myself to sleep on a mattress in my friend’s spare room after being sick over and over again. Neither of them came to check on me, and I didn’t see them again.

“What does it matter? It doesn’t change anything,” he said.

What is the Truth? It’s not subjective — it’s reality. But how many of us use it? What person can really say that in every moment and every scenario they tell the truth? Sometimes the better thing is not to tell the truth. Or the safer thing. Or the more peaceful thing. Sometimes even the kinder thing.

It was the acknowledgement of the lie without the offering of the truth.

He didn’t just lie to me. He changed the shape of reality.