Three seconds that changed everything

There was a silence between her words that lasted, in real time, probably nothing more than three seconds. But in the years that followed that silence, that pause, the amount of time for her to gather her courage to tell me the truth was a thick, impenetrable wall that mercilessly separated two lives. Not only hers and mine, but the life I knew up until then and the life I’ve lived ever since. The three seconds before she told me, through that old landline phone, that there was someone else. Every time my mind goes back to that moment, I want to yell at my old self for being so trusting and naive. And once you see her in a different light, all of a sudden, like dominoes falling, that collapse of trust propagates back through time onto every event and interaction we had together and made me see how she never really was loyal. It was my mind choosing to stay blind, because I was that fool who thought real love was incorruptible. But I know now that she loved the way I loved her, more than she loved me. And when she started to find fault in the way I loved, there was no logical reason to be with me anymore. I do not mind that, in hindsight, our love was so unbalanced. I would have loved her the same. But I would have felt less lonely and misunderstood.