Again you are the smoke that is my breath
This bouquet of regret
For a long time, I had thought the beginning of the end was the night I found out my wife was seeing someone else behind my back. Later, after I discovered it was an affair that had started over a year before, it became merely the most horrible night of my life at the time. One of the things my wife inherited from me was my love of music. She picked out parts of my tastes and adapted them as her own, but in the end she was just a poser. I didn’t really think of it that way at the time, it was a lot of fun going to shows together and I genuinely enjoyed listening to music together. But I often caught her extending herself towards the musicians we met in ways that made me borderline uncomfortable. I’m not some groupie flinging myself trying to get people’s attention, I had a legitimate friendship with a lot of these people. The piece of shit she cheated on me with happened to be in a band we saw open up a show we went to while I was on a trip for work. She looked him up on Facebook and immediately started a disgusting & sexually inappropriate chain of conversations that turned into a full blown affair.
We went to see Dax Riggs on a humid summer night in 2013. The show was in Panama City Beach, at a pretty small bar that was probably used for shows that passed through town just because of a lack of other options. My wife, as usual, showed no judgement or awareness and got black out drunk pretty quickly into the night. This was without a doubt due to mixing cocktails with another substance. She was harassing a couple standing next to us almost the entire show, and just being more and more difficult to even be around. She also took notice of some other young girls standing directly in front of Dax while he was playing and made a snide comment about how they weren’t really important to him. There was something about the way she said it that was bizarre, and made me think “oh, and you are?”. We left halfway through the set because I couldn’t even keep her standing up.
While I was literally carrying her up the stairs, her cell phone fell out of her pocket and bounced down the stairs. I put her to bed and she was completely unconscious. After getting her situated, I went downstairs and picked up her phone. There was a text message as I was holding the phone that made me pause and just stare at the device I was holding in shock. Some other guy checking on her, finishing the text with “love you”. I read through the entire thread and I think I had an out of body experience. An entire relationship unfolded in front of me, photos of the two of them here in my hometown on the beach. She had flown this loser here using my money, after telling me to hit the road to go clear my head. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I called the phone number and left a message demanding that they stay away from my wife. Then I went upstairs and crawled into bed next to my corpse-like wife, and cried like a bitch.
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One of my most vivid memories of Samantha was when we saw Dax Riggs in Chicago a few years ago. We were exhausted from driving up from Florida and having extremely busy days in Atlanta and a beer festival in Indiana along the way. By the time we finally saw the show that night, we were seriously having trouble keeping our eyes open. We ended up seeing Dax before he went on, sitting in a booth alone. We sat and talked to him for a minute, and I took a photo of my wife next to him. This was before she had done anything that would give me cause for concern regarding musicians so I thought nothing of it. The actual show started late. When you go a certain amount of time without sleep, especially in a time frame of several nights with barely any rest, I think something happens to your mind and physical body. I felt like I was high, the lights of the stage blurring in front of me. “I Hear Satan” was the song being played, and my wife swayed in my arms, looking me dead in the eyes. We were surrounded by people, but it felt like we were alone in our own existence. It is the sexiest and intense moment I can remember about my marriage.
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This past Friday, my wife asked if we could at least be friends. She worded things in her usual sweet, hope inspiring style of manipulation. And finally, after all of the years of always giving in and thinking there could be some change, I replied “No”. And deep within my heart, and my mind, I knew that this was indeed the end. Of everything. For good. And fittingly enough, that night I went and saw Dax Riggs. This agent of oblivion had been the soundtrack to this entire fucked up journey of sadness and betrayal, and that night he was performing the last songs of a chapter that was closing forever.
