Am I disloyal or delusional? I cannot say. Both torment me deeply. I have been unfaithful, yes, but not in the way you might think. I never wanted to cheat on my wife. I am not lying. And still I think, what’s worse: to endure pain in the name of love, or cause it in the name of truth?

Was there a time I loved her? Yes. I campaigned for her adoration, fought for her joy, and felt ill when we were apart. She controlled me with her smile, with the divinity of her face, and the tenderness of her body. Then one day, she became immune to my affection. Oh, how it hurt me! It was wickedness to deprive a soul of something for which it cannot live without. Every day was starvation. No, I am not lying. I shudder just thinking of it, not only for the unending desire to please her, but also for the realisation that I had done nothing to displace her heart, and yet I was clueless to its whereabouts. I had the feeling of castles crumbling.

It wasn’t long before I had the suspicion that she was seeing someone. One evening when she returned home, I saw a retreating look in her eyes, a hollowing look, a look of indifference, and I knew then that she was sick of me. I was assured of it, and the ensuing days and weeks only confirmed this feeling. She would wake earlier than me, and return later. When I gestured toward her with my hands and lips, she withered away from me. I tried exchanging kind gestures she once knew and understood, but she was content to let them fall to the floor, unrecognised. I searched for warmth, high and low, but a frigid coldness ruled over us.

Then I became terribly delusional. When I was alone on the street, I had hallucinations of her voice and another’s, and when I turned around, I saw no one, just my heart pounding there on the pavement.

Occasionally, she would say:

“I’ve just been so tired lately.” But it wasn’t true.

One evening, I saw she was joyful; there was no mistaking it. The corners of her lips were raised, her dimples were present, and her eyes changed colour. I am not joking. They were grey just that morning, but now they were hazel brown. I could hear her heart fluttering with newfound love. Even her breathing was not her own. It was overtaken with profound desire. I watched her intently on the bed, then looked away, and still I could see the radiating glow from her face reflected along the far wall like a mirror. I shivered. It was a passage from the relative to the absolute. Someone stole her heart, and she let them keep it.

We sat still, beside one another. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Is there anything you want to tell me?” I did not turn toward her.

“What do you mean?”

The soft and disarming tenor in her voice wrong-footed me, undercutting my tongue. I had the premonition of adultery, which filled the space of the room like a soundless scream. A small dewy moustache of perspiration hovered over my lip. I hesitated, shrank, helpless, and lumpishly kept silent.

I waited months for a moment when she would come clean. But the only thing that followed was a funeral in my brain. Oh, how I grieved our marriage! I knew my intuition was correct, even if there was no empirical evidence to support it. And for that same reason, I suppose, I let myself nosedive into the depths of a countermeasure I thought I was deserving of.

How unfair would it be to-well, to allow her to bang the gavel before I had a say in the matter?

There’s nothing much more I can add to what I’m about to describe, other than to tell you precisely how it happened. So I will.

She came home one night and immediately sank into the sofa, her face flushed, her cheeks pink and pulsing with something I could only describe as satiated pleasure. I am not lying. She was having an affair. But with whom? When I asked her about her day, everything she said seemed factually true but emotionally dishonest. She was enveloped in a horribly hot radiance. I felt it even when she was in the other room. She was in a full flood of passions that turned my stomach inside out. I couldn’t take it. I watched as she prepared herself a small meal, and an expression of terminal agony seized my face.

It was at this point that I stormed out of the house. I drove feverishly into town. I stopped by a bar. I took a seat and proceeded to get drunk. A woman was sitting alone on the opposite end, and our eyes locked, and my mind wandered through temptations too deep to conceive. There was nothing particularly eventful about this woman or her features. But she struck me all the same. Right away, she was a barrel of laughter and sweetness and tenderness, all the things that I had forgotten could exude from a woman. I was sucked into the epicenter of her flirtatious energy. A lovely phosphorescence shone from her face. Each shot I took back, her elegance doubled. She would collapse a hand on my hand, and on my knee, and in my head, I kissed her lips and caressed her cheeks. She transported me into a different realm. Together, we jumped the rungs of infatuation without climbing them properly. Her breathing expressed her desire, and she was unable to keep from expressing it.

We sat and talked for hours, with a growing grammar of attachment and yearning. It was the terrain of love. I am not lying. And when the bar closed, we staggered out of it together and into the expiring summer night, thinking then of how to make the most of the remaining seconds which had suddenly become so precious to us.

She had an idea that I was delighted by. When we reached her apartment, we hurried inside as if the sky were on the verge of collapsing. Upstairs, the drapes of her studio were parted. The window was bare and halfway open, letting in a cool breeze. The lights were off. The moon spilt onto the carpet in milky white beams. I felt adolescent with her eyes on me, and we embraced, finding a sanctuary in each other’s bodies. And when we were finished, she said:

“I don’t want you to say anything.”

And so I didn’t. We lingered on the bed for as long as we could, silently passing notes of the heart, then she stared out at the window and remarked that it was almost sunrise. I left shortly after that.

Outside, there was light rising on the horizon, birds chirping, and people emerging from their homes.

All the way home, I felt as though I had fled with treasure. In my chest was an electric fever. I gazed with infinity at the new sun. I had the urge to sing even though I was not a singing man.

When I entered through the door of my apartment, I was surprised to see that she was awake.

“Where have you been?” she said.

With mingled relief, pleasure, and peace, I had the swift intuition that the next moment might prove to be sweeter than I could have predicted.

But before I could say a word, she interjected that there was also something that she wanted to tell me, something she had been wanting to tell me all night, and before that, for months, but she didn’t know how to. I nodded, allowing her the space to speak, aware of what it was she wanted to say but not revealing it on my face.

But the next words that she uttered completely floored me.

“Depressed?” I repeated.

Two trails ran down the corners of her eyes and into the corners of her mouth.

The lingering weight of her words moved me toward the sofa, seated me, and placed my arms around her, and oceans rained down her cheeks. I am not lying. She couldn’t help herself. And neither could I. Everything was all so clear. Her clinically saddened state had colored her emotions, leaving no room for anything else except what the prescriptions recommended to her by the doctor, which was only a small and temporary measure. It was a ruinous moment. It wasn’t right. It was my own fault, and yet it wasn’t. I wanted to take my own life. I am not lying.

Finally, we caught our breath in the after shock. Then she turned to me solemnly and asked what it was that I wanted to tell her.

And so, I ask you again, what’s worse: to endure pain in the name of love, or cause it in the name of truth?