Read the story of my skin
Tell me more about the man I should have been
I’ll be the martyr…Falling from his grace again
5 years today since that first date. I am going to open up to you about something I have never told anyone. The person Samantha cheated on me with was the drummer in an old metal band called Prong. His name is Alexei Rodriguez. I think he is 42 years old now. We went to see them open up for Clutch in Pensacola. Then I took her on a work trip with me to Savannah Georgia and they were opening up for COC while we were there. I saw her stop him after their set and give him a hug. I didn’t think anything of it, I am a very trusting person. Or at least I was back then.
The next month I happened to see her phone screen while we were watching TV, I was leaning my head on her shoulder. I never looked at her phone. Ever. But seeing the name alexei was strange because I had never heard of this person and the content of the text that popped up was confusing. She told me it was a girl she had known before she met me that liked the same music as me. I believed her for about 3 months that this was a girl. Then one day at Starbucks she left her phone on the table and it went off. Again, strange text message and this time it was kind of sexual. I scrolled through the messages and sure enough it was definitely not a girl and they were talking about sex and how attractive she thought he was. She was also telling him music related stories that either happened to me in real life, or that I had told her. I still didn’t know how she knew this person though. I went on Facebook and figured it out by looking at the comments written on random posts and photos and then googling the name. I think you know the rest of what happened, we separated after she threw a drink on my face at AJs then beat the hell out of me when we got home and destroyed my office. The police were called, saw all the marks on me, and suggested I go stay at my mothers.
We decided that I would stay at my moms while she looked for a place to stay. We never once said we were getting a divorce, after that first week or so of being really emotional and upset. One day, Samm suggested to me that I go out of town to take some time for myself and to let things calm down. I told her that sounded like a good idea and the very next day, my friend Matt and I drove from Santa Rosa Beach to Alaska. We were gone 10 days. While I was gone, Samantha took the money my father had given her to live on while we separated, and bought a plane ticket for Alexei. He came down to Florida and stayed with her the entire time. She even got him a job where she was working at the Elephant Walk out in San Destin. I found all of this out after the Dax Rigg show when I saw her phone. I found out that she had paid for it and had this all planned out before we even separated by looking at her school email months later when she asked me to help her register for classes.
We were only apart two months at the time of the Dax Riggs show but when she got pilled out and was totally unconscious afterwards I saw her phone and looked at the texts. And the photos. I called the phone number, got the voice mail and demanded he stay away from my wife and that we were still married. And then he started texting me graphic details about how he had sex with my wife, and how much of an awful parent I was. This went on for months. All the while I saw Samantha almost every day and tried to do what I could to convince her to come home and stop this relationship with Alexei. I still helped her out financially. I paid her rent almost every month that she was at this other house. It was off Main Street in Destin and I still get a bad feeling when I drive past it. It got to the point where she didn’t even really even hide her communication with him right in front of my face. Texts were coming in constantly when she was with Cali and I. They were always the same stupid pointless conversations. It was like she dumbed herself down just to speak to this idiot. This consumed my life. I was constantly trying to see what was really going on. I can’t even imagine how much money and time I threw down the drain living like this. Most nights going to sleep alone in an empty house while she was going out after work and having an open relationship with another man. When I eventually met all her coworkers, I could tell they were pretty confused to see me and see how I still treated her with respect and love.
This went on until the middle of July, when I found out she was flying up to North Carolina to see him. I begged her not to go. Cried at her feet. She still took the rental car I had (she had totaled the new car that I bought her back on July 4th), and drove to New Orleans to get on a plane. She had some sort of final fear of throwing her marriage away, and when she got to North Carolina, called me crying. I got her a hotel and a flight home the next morning. She promised to never speak to him again and that this was over. Of course this was a lie. The texts from him came, taunting me with all of this, and ridiculing her. Pretty much saying what an awful girl she was and that he didn’t want her anyway. Meanwhile they started emailing each other again about a week later. She caught me looking at her phone reading an email, and beat me worse than ever before. Our entire master bedroom was destroyed. I bought her a brand new car the next day.
We got pregnant the next month before we went to Estonia. She knew I wanted a baby and said later it was the only way she thought she could get me to stay with her after everything that had happened. While we were in Tallinn, she started using Skype to contact Alexei. She was on a different flight home than me because I was staying longer to work at a coffee shop in Estonia for a few weeks. She forgot to log out of Skype on my laptop, so it showed their entire conversation as it happened in real time while she was in the airport. She hadn’t even gotten onto the plane before she was saying that she was in Europe with a friend and that she wanted to see him as soon as she got back home. I told her it was over when she got to the next airport, and of course she told me that since she was pregnant she would come after me. I flew home the next day and of course got texts from Alexei throwing everything in my face, including laughing about the thought that the baby was his.
We had a miscarriage on my birthday two months later. A week later, I found all of the old emails that proved she was having an affair this entire time, over a year ago and only a few months after we had our wedding and bought our brand new house. They were sexual and inappropriate from the very first day. And were constant the entire time, almost every single day. On my birthday, on Christmas while we were in California visiting family, on Valentines Day…nothing was sacred. The week after I found all of this out, she was diagnosed with cancer.
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She started the affair all over again when we got back from Iceland. She had relapsed, stolen money from me for pills before we left, and then spent a chunk of our time in Iceland going through awful withdrawals or totally drunk off vodka. I came home from work the first day back and picked up the iPad to look at photos, and of course their entire Skype conversation was on the screen. When I refused to say that I would give her another chance, she destroyed every single memento we had from our wedding. Everything. Finally, she picked up the poster that Cali and I made her using hundreds of photos of us as a family, shaped into a heart. I told her that if she destroyed that, I would call the police. The cops had been to our house 3 times prior for domestic violence calls. All 3 times they made me leave, even though she was the one who had hit me. So she got to spend the night in jail this time. I bailed her out the next day.
On August 17th, she got on a one way flight and left for good. I wish that was the end of it, but 9 confusing, convoluted months followed. Whether it was concerns for her health, my out of control drinking, or the painful shame of failing in a marriage, the end was hard to come about. It finally came to an end 2 months after I finally got sober. Almost 5 years exactly. I have tried to completely erase it from my everyday life. I want no reminder at all about any of this. I switched gyms since we met at golds, got tattoo cover ups, erased everything I possibly could.
Samantha, I forgive you. Alexei, I also forgive you as well. I don’t feel sorry for either of you. I just forgive you. Hating you would mean carrying a part of you and the memories with me, and I want neither. Forgiveness has led to total annihilation of something that ruined me for a very long time. A fresh start would not be possible without this, and I learned that the hard way. Every life lesson and period of growth was not inspired by you at all. It was just a matter of survival. I wish no ill will towards what remains of your life, just that it doesn’t ever cross paths with my own.
