No one will ever know that you love her, long after she’s moved on and replaced you with another man.

No one will be there to see your tears and your sorrow and the longing you feel in your bones.

For a few weeks and maybe even months, if you’re lucky, someone will listen. You will feel heard.

Eventually, though. You’ll hear it: that sound of annoyance in the voice of another. So you’ll stop talking.

You’ll no longer express outwardly that your world is broken and all you ever wished to feel, touch, smell… see… taste. It’s gone. Those senses belong to another — someone who put in no work but enjoys the fruit.

You’ll hate them both. You might date. You might move forward. You might smile once in a long while at a joke or at a movie.

But she’s still there.

She lives deep in your heart permanently. She always will.

Your children will have long ago adapted to a new normal. You’ll smile at them and you’ll make them dinner and watch Pixar.

You’ll love them.

They won’t see you hurt. They won’t see the 8 beers you drank in your closet on a Thursday evening while you silently suffer years after you lost the woman who gave birth to them.

It’s your struggle now. Yours only.

And you’ll be glad they don’t know. You’ll feel blessed this is your cross to bear.

You’ll just wear a mask and you’ll wonder if your trespasses were so egregious that it was deserving of a life sentence of solitude, grating pain and wanting it all to end.

But your daughter will smile and say, “I love you, Daddy.”

For a moment you’ll smile at the innocence and the levity.

But you’ll realize you saw her in your daughter. You saw her features, her attitude. You saw her essence in your little girl.

And so you’ll weep years later on a closet floor because you stopped being fun in this modern world with your mindset of abundance and loyalty.

You’ll know the woman you would have died for was dying to experience something other than familiarity.

You will hope you might wake up tomorrow and have accepted it. That it wasn’t a dream.

You will force a smile and head out for the world with a hope that something future is equal to the past.

What was will never be topped.

You will cry for that, too.

If you didn’t, I did.