Betrayal

Eight months after him, she sat in somebody else’s car. Let somebody else hold her, embrace her, kiss her. Every moment and every movement felt so wrong, yet something that was meant to be. She felt guilt as well as a feeling of liberation. She wonders if she has betrayed him, his being, his memory and the pain his memory always caused.  

She wonders if she has betrayed him and yet also wonders how can she? She had resisted, but she wonders now if she resisted hard enough? And if she didn’t, did she want the other guy’s advances?

Eight months and every memory as fresh as new; every pang of pain as excruciating as day one; every tear another harbinger of the memories of her loss. Just when she was beginning to wonder if she will ever be free, just when she started questioning the fates about the extent of her punishment on this earth, someone stepped in, ever so briefly, and shook her existence of the past several months.

The arms, the lips, the person by her side, were all so strange. Yet the experience was not. She wonders if the other man made her laugh more; gave her more attention and she liked it, did she betray the one before?

She wonders if staying loyal to someone’s memory was more important than opening up to someone new or did it just feel like it?

She remembered in the early days of her loss the doctor prescribed her some medicine to make her feel better. She never took it. She felt if she stopped feeling the pain, if she let the memories get dim, she will betray the person who had been her all. She wonders if letting someone else in is equal to that betrayal.

She wonders if she should have resisted and stayed true to the memory. Yet at the moment, all she felt was a need to apologize for someone else taking his place. Not for a moment did she feel something wrong was happening. It is this feeling of “not feeling guilty” that is causing all the guilt. 

She wonders what defines betrayal and if she has been guilty of it? And if she has, was her love for the first man a lie? Was the pain she feel after him nothing but a mirage?

She wonders if his memory will surround her still. She wonders if she will still catch a glimpse of him in someone’s smile, the breadth of someone else’s shoulders, in a perfect stranger’s frown. She wonders if by being disloyal to his memory she has lost her right to feel incomplete without him, to miss his arms around her, the pressure of his hand on hers, the way his thumb played with her right ear, the way his fingers traced the veins on her hand the way he gave her all those funny names. She wonders if by betraying his memory, she has finally lost him.

She wonders and finds no answer.