I had this girlfriend once where things were getting pretty serious. We wanted to move in together, so we went looking for an apartment. The second one our real estate agent took us to was perfect, we both loved it, so we made the decision to move in. Our neighbour was a really nice guy named Joseph. His wife had left him a few years prior, leaving him alone to take care of his eight-year old son. I always felt kinda bad for the guy. He had this weird accent that was really hard to place.

It was vaguely Eastern-European, but whenever we’d ask him where he was from, he’d avoid the question, so eventually we just stopped asking. Anyway, my girlfriend and I were happy and everything was going along great. We weren’t rich by any means, but we were getting by, Things changed when she got laid off from her job at the government. Our rent wasn’t cheap, and we both had student loans to take care of, so I pushed myself further into my work to provide for the both of us. It was a pretty rough time. She spent most of her days at home scouring the internet for job postings, and I’d spend the majority of my time at work trying to get a promotion. It was around this time that she got pregnant. Despite the stress from our financial troubles and my constant working, I still knew that I loved her,and I wanted to make sure that she knew I was fully committed to her and the baby, so I proposed. She said yes, and it seemed like we’d be able to get through these difficulties. Tensions were still a little high, but we were doing okay. We set the wedding date for two months before she was due to give birth, as we knew we’d be too busy after the baby was born to really enjoy our wedding. Then, about three months into the pregnancy, she burst in to our bedroom crying and yelled that she had to tell me something. It  was hard to get it out of her at first, but eventually she admitted to me that she had been cheating on me with Joseph for the past five months, and that she wasn’t sure if the baby was mine. I’m not all that proud of this, but I freaked out. I’d poured myself into my work to provide for her, to try and make our future together work, and she’d betrayed me. I kicked her out. I know I seem like a jerk, but I couldn’t stand the thought of the women that I’d loved, the women that I thought had loved me, continuing to live in the same apartment as me as if nothing had happened. It was as if she had shattered my entire world. I was beyond pissed, and since I couldn’t take my frustration out on her, I focused on Joseph instead. I stormed over and banged on his door, and when he opened it, I socked him as hard as I could right in the eye, with his eight year old son looking on from the other room. I’ll admit, he took the punch like a man. He just smiled at me, laughed once, and closed the door. I’ll never forget the look on his son’s face. The next day, I saw him walking past our door holding a cotton ball to the eye I’d punched. I felt bad for hitting him, but at the same time, I was kind of glad I’d done it. He’d basically taken my whole world and crushed it, you know? Shortly after that, he and his kid moved out. I was at work when they left. I didn’t even know they were leaving. Just there one moment and gone the next, you know? I didn’t give it all that much thought. By that point, the anger had worn off and I was left a hollow wreck. My job started to suffer as my boss noticed that I wasn’t really able to focus on my work. I was really close to being fired, but he knew about my situation and recommended to me that I go to a therapist. Knowing how messed up the whole thing had left me, I took his advice and started to attend biweekly sessions. It felt like it was helping me to put my life back together. I was just starting to feel in control again when my ex showed up at my door. She’d had the baby, and told me she had nowhere else to go. This may make me seem like a horrible person, but I couldn’t just swallow my pain, ignore everything that she’d put me through, and pretend that she hadn’t hurt me. I couldn’t. I was furious that she’d come begging for my help after betraying me, after tearing my world apart. I screamed at her to leave and told her to go to her parents and explain to them how terrible she had been. She didn’t have much fight in her, I could tell that the last months had been difficult for. She looked down at her feet and told me she couldn’t bear to face them. In what is probably the most infuriating moment of my life, she asked me if I knew where Joseph was. I turned away to keep from exploding at her even more, and said through bared teeth, “If it hadn’t been for Cotton-Eyed Joe, I’d have been married a long time ago. Where did you come from, where did you go, where did you come from Cotton-Eyed Joe.”