The Vortex

I highly recommend you go read conflictedlove’s post The Vortex.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard an affair described as a vortex before, but it fits. The affair was a mistake, but it took a lot of little mistakes to get there. All those little lines that were crossed leading up to the big ones – telling her I loved her, kissing her, having sex with her – were steps leading down into the pit, down into the vortex.

WARNING: HERE BE TRIGGERS!!!! PROCEED WITH CAUTION

Like confictedlove, I tried several times to end things. I’d be strong for a few hours or maybe even a few days, but the attraction was strong. Every time I’d start missing her and the excitement. Like a junkie, I’d crash hard and find myself desperate for a fix – one more email, one more IM, one more time seeing her, feeling her, tasting her, making her my whore.

I don’t use that term lightly. It gets thrown about a lot and it’s almost always meant hatefully. That’s not how I mean it. I didn’t think of it in those terms then, but that’s what I was doing – making her my whore. She was just as addicted to me, if not more than, I was to her. I knew what to say and how to touch her to give her that high. And when she was high, she became a whore – raw, unthinking, single-minded, animalistic desire and sexuality.

That’s when I would get my biggest high – not from the sex, but the gratification of doing that to her, driving her out of her mind with desire and pleasure. I’d never known a high like that before. The other times we were together, when we would talk and share things or just be together – that was a high, too, and I needed that high. But comparing the two is like comparing a few shots of whiskey to a line of coke.

But I digress. Where was I? Oh right, the vortex.

It wasn’t all highs, it was lows, too. What was I doing to my wife and my kids? How could I have let myself get to that place? How could I call myself a Christian and feel that way?

And yes, I’m ashamed to say, one of the lows was that Scarlet and I couldn’t be together. I didn’t want to leave my wife, but I didn’t want to be without Scarlet. It was an inherently unstable position, but I lacked the resolve to go one way or the other with it, which is a pretty low place to be.

I thank God that he saved me when he did. It’s like when you’re a kid and you see the vortex in the bathtub when you drain the water. The vortex looks strong, but all it takes is a wave of the hand and the vortex is disrupted. That’s what God did for me when Scarlet and I were caught in the car. It didn’t immediately fix things, but it disrupted the vortex just enough for me to claw my way out of the hole I was in.

So like I said, go read her post. I didn’t mean to take her post and make my own based on it. You should read it anyways because she says things very differently than I have just now – perhaps a bit more coherently as well.

I know this post probably raised a lot of questions about my affair, so please ask them in the comments. If you’re new here, please read my old posts before you judge. I promise I’m not a monster, I’m just a very broken person who is trying to be honest with himself and with the world. Because conflictedlove is right – we do deceive ourselves before we deceive anyone else.