THE END OF THE AFFAIR Part 3

The following weekend was Valencia. I had the dress, the shoes, the shawl. I was so excited and felt so, so secure in us. He had invited me to his Brother´s wedding?! Too fast, too lacking in caution I now see.

I met his daughter for the first time outside the hotel. She threw her arms around me with an excited, all consuming energy and love. His grandmother gave me an icy hello. Why had she been so frosty with me when in the end I am the injured party? Did she know something I didn´t about him, his ex wife, his taste in women?
Disjointed communication and an odd distance between the family members. The children all took to me straight away. Him and I then escaped and had the most romantic evening I have had in a long time. It culminated in a drunken phone call to my mother saying he loved her daughter and then hours devouring each other in the dark, stripped naked of any other worries or issues; purely physical mixed with loving words and hushed voices.

The next day, the Wedding day. People I didn´t know or care about. I suppose I was an imposter.
He was serious and tired, united to his longterm friend; weariness and lack of sleep. I was elated. I spent most of the day with his daughter in the hairdressers and shopping but missing him. She told the hairdresser I was her mother.

The wedding itself was a mix of observations towards him and the family dynamic, tainted with loneliness and insecurity. He didn´t drink, he didn´t actively respond to me. My acts of affection were met with affection, but I had to go to him.
At the dinner table in the vast, canteenesque banquet hall, he had told me to stop worrying as I had to focus on his actions, not on his words and that he had taken me to the wedding. Was that not enough proof of his feelings? In retrospect, no.

The end to the weekend was dramatically different to the ending I had experienced in Madrid just one week before. I had cried quietly in the bathroom on the evening of the wedding when we had returned to the hotel. He was tired. I felt rejected in some way and my strong and unfailing instincts had told me that something irrevocable had changed in the dynamics of our relationship. He had got impatient with me as he had heard me cry. He tried to comfort me but I saw a total lack of empathy. The next day he was in a bad mood. HE had a 6 hour drive back to Madrid. HE hadn´t slept well. I WAS seemingly the selfish one, and yet I was the one who later on put myself in his shoes, thought it through and generously or stupidly adapted myself to his needs.
 I stuck it out. He took me to the train station. We had a fast food lunch. I showed him my most recently published article. He didn´t read it. I felt trepidation. I felt the sense of an ending. He left with his daughter and said ´Te quiero´.
That was the last time we saw each other. The communication continued as always but I saw signs of waning commitment. I saw signs of a confused, overworked man who couldn´t live up to the image he had created of himself. I saw cruelty and impatience and then regret. I saw huge amounts of frustration. I saw the hideous vice of potential alcoholism rear it´s ugly head. I witnessed the sense of being the victim in a badly thought out game of two halves, where sentiments and love are disrespected and under valued. I saw and experienced a distancing, and then the silence came.