I wish I didn't.

But I love him more than I have ever loved any one else. And I still feel like he is my partner and lover and sweetheart and anything else you could think to call it... the love of my life.

I don't know how to turn those feelings off. I wish I could, because it hurts me to feel that way towards him, not because of the betrayal, but because he is gone. And I miss him so desperately.

I'm finding myself avoiding going to bed again. I am SO tired. And I don't wnat to go to bed. The second I lay down I am compeltely overwhelemed with anxiety. I feel so panicky. Thinking about everything, my mind is a total swirl and I want to scream and cry and run away. I think about being in the house and I want to scream to make it stop. I think about being scared and I want to cry for him to be there to comfort me. I think about him touching me and then the betrayal and my skin crawls over that thought and I want to vomit and scrub myself all over with sandpaper everywhere he ever touched me. The "safe" places in my mind they tell you to retreat to in those anxiety classes, picture a serene place or a person where you feel protected when you begin to feel overwhelmed or upset... I've always gone to the man in my life as the big comfort and protector in those situations. And when I bring him to my mind- usually involuntarily, I feel sick.

Yet I love him and miss him. I am so mixed up.

I had a photo shoot on Sunday with a client whom knows the brief version of what happened. She works for a personal injury law firm and I gave her a brief synopsis in September when I had a meeting with her before her wedding at her office. Her dad is a retired chief police detective and she spoke to him about everything as well- not telling him who I was. (Thank the Lord for that because I met him at the wedding and I would have been humilated for him to have known all of that about me.)

When I saw her yesterday she was telling me about all of this and aksing me how things were going, and trying to encourage me to go forward, telling me how important it was. Particularly the things her dad said about Matt being a highway patrolman... that it was abslutely dispicable that he was representing such an upstanding organization and behaving in such a way. Apparently her Dad had alot to say about the switching of the name badge thing. He also had a number of things to say about fraud, which I didn't think was applicable since we didn't share property, but my client said he spoke of it for a long time. It may be he was talking about criminal, rather than civil law, but I don't know.

Anyway, when my client was talking about this, and trying to encourage me to do something about what he has done, I said... something, and she replied with, "Well, your life will never be the same again. He has forever changed your life. It is as simple as that. You will never trust people again. You will never have the ability to trust people in the same way you did every again. You won't ever have that ability to just innocently trust someone. He stole that from you and you're not going to be able to get it back. He changed your life. He destroyed that."

And it's true. And of course in all that therapy crap they tell you that you will work through things and make it better and blah blah blah and don't make blanket statements or say things like "always" "never" etc. BUT... She's right, and I know she is. He stole something from me. He stole innocence. So much of that has been given away or taken already at this point, and he took I don't know... probably everything that I had left, everything that I had saved and treasured and protected and given him because he was the one and I implicitly trusted him like no other. I told him all of my secrets. I was assaulted when I was a pre-teen. He knew that. He knew I had problems with depression. He knew all of me. He did all of this anyway.

Something else that makes this all the more serious? He's a cop. Talk about the ultimate violation of trust. If you can't trust a police officer, the ultimate upholder of the law, who can you trust?

Well, no one, of course.