Total pages in book: 87
Estimated words: 83102 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83102 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 332(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
I let Matthew break up with me on a Monday and he moved his new girlfriend into our apartment on Tuesday. In fact, it wasn’t even one full calendar day before another woman was flossing at my sink! Using my cereal bowls! Kissing Matthew’s smug face!
Regretfully, I never showed him my anger or my hurt before I left Montgomery. I kept it bottled up because even at the end, I felt like I had to maintain the perfect girlfriend status. Matthew Mason fell in love with the shiny version of me, the blonde put-together sorority president. The popular Auburn girl.
“Madison, I just don’t think it’s right to continue to lead you on,” he said the night he ended our relationship, as if we hadn’t been together for four years, cohabitating for the last two. As if he hadn’t slipped his mother’s antique engagement ring onto my left finger and proclaimed I was the love of his life in front of all our college friends.
I almost wish I hadn’t made it so easy for him. The same evening he ended our engagement, we started packing up my things. Matthew already had moving boxes ready to go. This fact hadn’t stood out to me at the time, but now I wonder if he picked them up earlier that day or if he’d had them stowed somewhere for weeks.
“Do you want to take this shampoo?” he asked me. “The purple one?”
“Oh…” I responded numbly. “Sure.”
He dumped it into a box along with my other toiletries.
“What about your shaving cream?”
When I didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, he glanced over to see me staring down at my shining square-cut engagement ring.
“Listen, why don’t you stay the night? I’ll take the couch in the living room and you can sleep in here. Then you can figure out where you want to go in the morning.”
At the time, it sounded like he was doing me a huge favor. His tone, his inflection, the pitying little smile. Look at me, such a gentleman, taking the couch. I’m even packing up your soaps!
“Matthew,” I called quietly after he’d gone back to packing in the bathroom. “Where’d you meet her? The other woman?”
“Oh, she’s my secretary.”
There was no remorse in his words, no hint of shame.
I feel disgusted thinking back on that night. When did I become so meek? Such a pushover?! Sure, there’s having dignity and poise, but I missed a perfectly good opportunity to chuck a shoe at Matthew’s head, to call him a slew of colorful names. I could have…I could have…oh my god, I could have taken a page out of little Nathan’s book and plunged his beloved Rolex into the toilet. Surely that would have taught him a lesson.
It’s actually wild to think I was going to marry this man! I was going to have kids with him! I was desperate to do it, in fact. Have kids, I mean. That’s the source of most of my pain, knowing I’m that much farther away from starting a family. Thanks to Matthew.
It wasn’t that I was completely delusional during our relationship. I thought I was happy. Sure, there were cracks (in retrospect, more like huge gaping chasms), but I thought it was easier to push forward and proceed as planned than to pull the plug on the entire thing.
I was obsessed with the notion of being perfect and looking perfect. The way Matthew and I seemed from the outside, no one could deny we were a great couple. He was on his way up in politics and I was the smart, capable, aesthetically pleasing woman by his side, ready to plan his campaign parties and host influential donor dinners.
My mom—god love Queenie—was the first person to call bullshit on all of it. When I called her the night of our breakup, she wasn’t surprised in the least. “That man wasn’t your soulmate.”
“Thanks for telling me that now. Were you just going to let me marry him?”
“Honey, now why would I insert myself into your relationship when all I had to do was bide my time and let that fool show his true colors? I swear, one day you will come to appreciate him ending things like this, before you walked down the aisle.”
I snorted in disbelief, but she continued, “Think about it, Madison. If he’s the kind of asshole to cheat on you for lord knows how long, he’s doing you a real favor ending things. You were going to have children with him!” She shuddered at the thought. “This way, at least, you can get a nice clean break.”
It doesn’t feel nice and clean. It feels messy and ugly and scary.
For the first time in a long time, I don’t know what my life is going to look like in five years. I probably won’t have the cute little family I was so excited about, but I do know one thing: I will never be Mrs. Matthew Mason.