I started keeping a stupid little diary. Not the gushy kind — a ledger. Date, time, thing that stung. It felt weirdly clinical to write, "May 12 — saw him at café, red coat, laughed." But handwriting it made it less like a wound and more like evidence. Every entry settled the chaos inside me a notch. Memory is slippery; paper is honest.
When you catalog pain, it becomes manageable. You can look at it, arrange it, decide which piece to burn and which to file. I wrote down the times she left suddenly, the texts that arrived at odd hours, the lunches that stretched too long. I added marginalia — who could verify, who would lie, who's likely to gossip. I labeled things "weak" or "useful." It's fucking ridiculous how a man in love can turn into an archivist of betrayal, but here we are.
At home the apartment felt different. I started placing the diary in odd spots — on the nightstand, then in a drawer — to remind myself I was both man and machine now. Sometimes I'd open it and read the entries like a detective reading a client file. Reading calmed me; it made the future feel programmable instead of terrifying.
There were moments, though, when the old muscle memory of love kicked in. I'd catch myself missing how she made tea, or the curve of her smile when she was truly amused. Those flashbacks are traitors — they slow you down, make you soft. I learned to grit my teeth and turn those memories into fuel. The diary was my conversion furnace: grief in, cold plan out.
At work I moved with purpose. I fed the dossier more data: hotel receipts, odd transaction notifications, a name someone muttered in the canteen. Every scrap tightened the net. People think revenge is poetic. It isn't. It's mostly boring—phone calls, filings, small waits. But the boring keeps you from being stupid. The diary kept me stupid-proofed. It kept me honest.
That week, a new line in the ledger made me both sick and excited: a credit card charge at a boutique hotel, timestamped at an hour she'd claimed to be at her sister's. Proof. All the slow leaks started coalescing into a pipe you can actually hold. I closed the diary, felt that cold clarity again. This was getting real.