A year ago today was the last time Husband had intercourse with a prostitute

To my knowledge. As far as he can remember. And that will have to do.

Specifically, it was blonde, 25-30 year-old Ashely at the Four Points Sheraton on Sepulveda. (This is the price of getting the details...there's no getting rid of them once you have them.)

I told Husband last night that there is so much about all of this that just hurts me so deeply. Last night it was imagining Husband lying beside me as he was at that moment thinking about having sex with Ashley the next day. I don't even know if he'd arranged it by then, but the thought that at some point over his 3 1/2 years of secretly having sex with prostitutes he must have had a "date" arranged as he lay beside me at least once cuts me to my core.

His betrayal, while very explainable in terms of his illness (addiction,) feels in my heart and my gut like an act of hateful aggression toward the love and trust that I gave so freely and completely. All the knowing in the world somehow doesn't completely ease the pain. I swing back and forth between understanding that in his addict mind his betrayal was so completely compartmentalized that he believed it had nothing to do with me to feeling pain and depression about the loss of trust and the deep connection I felt with him.

I was reading about the Four Seals (different from the Four Noble Truths):
All compounded things are impermanent
All emotions are pain
All things have no inherent existence
Nirvana is beyond concepts

If I look at what has happened through this lens, I can begin to get some peace. Everything is impermanent, good as well as bad. With great joy comes the possibility for great pain. Reality is a construct (a chair is a chair because I call it a chair.) And the perfect peace of the mind that is free from craving, anger and other afflictive states is unlike anything I can conceive of because I'm human.

But my ability to hold on to that perspective, and authentically feel that peace, is inconsistent at best.

For the past couple weeks I've been going through a down of the ups-and-downs cycle. The ups are getting much longer, so hopefully the down cycle will be correspondingly short.