Ok, so I found this really long answer to a question on Quora, which is a social media platform where people ask and answer each others' questions. The question posed here was: "Which experiences went into the longest minutes of your life?" The top answer was by this dude, Owen Skarpness, who was apparently madly in love with his fiance and dated her for basically his whole life, and then he came home early from hunting one day to find her asleep and in bed with his best friend. Keep in mind he walked in the door with his gun cuz he just got done hunting. You can read his whole story in italics below, but the basic question is: what do you do in this situation? Do you kill them both? Yourself? Would you do the same thing old Skarpy did and "forgive" or is that bullshit? (Skip to bottom of italics for rest of blog.)
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I
was engaged once to a girl I met in my last year of high school. I went
to college for 5 years in a different state than her, seeing her only
once every 3 weeks, faithfully forsaking what would otherwise be some
rather exceptional "college experiences." Staying faithful all that time
until finally moving in with her, then working with her for a year
before getting engaged, remaining faithful all the while.
Things weren't perfect, they never are, but they were great (even mind-blowingly spectacular) by my measure most times we were together, right up until we got engaged.
Something went wrong, she was afraid of the commitment, shied away, became reclusive, receded from the relationship.
Then, 6 months after we got engaged, I came back from seeing a friend of mine early. I wasn't supposed to be home until the next day, but thought my chances were better driving at night to make it back for work the next day than in the morning. My friend and I had been shooting that day (as was common sport in rural Indiana) and I was armed with some exceedingly nasty rounds in a gun I could shoot exceedingly accurate up to 50 yds, wearing-in a new holster I had just bought.
I came home, nothing seemed amiss. She was presumably asleep in bed. I put my gun down on the table just outside our room, too tired to put it completely away for the evening. We had no kids, the area was safe, she wasn't about to touch it, and having it at that table seemed nearly as good as putting it in a locked box at the time. I showered, brushed my teeth, and was in my boxers when I decided to climb into bed.
Stumbling into bed, I shone the dim front light of my phone on the covers, checking to see where she was so I didn't trample her as I crawled into my bed beside her. Saw her shape beneath. Lifted the covers to reveal her back facing me, naked.
When I had the funniest realization that I'll never forget. "Wait a minute," I thought, "that's not long hair!"
It's difficult to describe what it's like to experience the maximum possible amount of hatred and misery one could ever endure at one time, but that's precisely what built up in me the moment after I ran out of explanations which allowed me to deny what my eyes had just seen. I went through every possible combination of scenarios that could have occurred in order for my fiancé not to be sleeping with my best friend before the depth of that betrayal seeped into my veins.
It was like being filled with a white-hot, fiery, liquid rage so vivid, violent, and venomous that I could literally taste it as it coursed through my blood, leaked from my pores, ran down my face crusting in the salty corners of my mouth. Pure, unfiltered, unadulterated rage the likes of which I didn't know man was capable of oozed out of my very soul, poisoning me like mustard gas, choking my breath, churning my stomach.
They remained asleep there as I lifted my phone further up, finally revealing her aside Brutus, also seemingly naked. I dropped the sheet, ran to the bathroom, vomited. The room spun around me unhinged, like my soul. I felt like a human wrecking ball controlled by mindless apes, swinging violently in the air, threatening destruction of every life within my reach.
She was my love, my world, that which I had devoted myself to for 7 years, my entire adult life. She was everything to me that was important - my job, my house, my future. And there she was with Brutus. In my bed. With my friend that I trusted as much as her. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have not seen this coming?
I had to get the gun off the table, should he wake up and use it against me. I also had to not shoot them, or myself, or anyone else. As easy as that sounds, in that fit of rage, with that liquid hate pumping through me, in that maelstrom of misery and loathing, in my own very real personal hell it took every ounce of my being and more not to simply "cock the slide, pull the trigger" as it literally echoed in my head over and over and over again. It would have been that easy. It would have been just that simple to end their lives (or at least his). In retrospect, I'm thankful that the thought of shooting his penis off never occurred to me at the time because if it had, I almost certainly would have. The fact that I was engaged in the false dilemma of either killing or not killing was a virtual miracle of science that could have quite literally saved my life at that moment, so vivid was my ire...
I picked up the gun, dropped the magazine, entered the guest bedroom, put the gun in the cabinet, emptied the mag into my hand, put it and the bullets into separate drawers. And then I waited. It was all that I could do.
I know from experience that I can't drive when I'm angry. I also cannot drive when I'm tired. I was at the brink of my abilities upon arriving home, this could only exacerbate my lack of control. It was small-town Indiana. I had no friends I could call at 6 in the morning (except maybe the one who was lying in bed naked with my fiancé), there were no cabs, and there were no hotels in the town I was in. I was stuck for risk of killing myself or someone else on the road.
They wouldn't be awake until nearly 11.
So, in the guest bedroom, where he had stayed countless times before, I lay in a bed still unclean from when he last slept in it and writhed. And writhed. And writhed. And writhed. I'll still swear that each second in that bed that morning could have been a month. I wanted to sleep, to forget, to just simply end the pain but I could not, so fraught with madness and loathing as I was. There was no stopping it. The knife just kept twisting in my gut and there was no pulling it out. I tried making noise. I was throwing fits like a small child. I thought the blood might literally burst out of my face, hot and red like some horror film.
I could feel my very soul contorting inside me, willing me to put the bullets back in, to end it all any way I could. It was all over anyway. My whole life had been taken from me. I wasn't coming back from this. Everything was ruined. Everything was lost and worthless. And I was still reeling from the horror...
That was the longest day of my life. After she went to work around noon (and inexplicably "denying" the "incident") I remained in that bed wanting nothing more than to shrivel up and die. I quit the best job I ever had that day. I lost the greatest thing I ever loved. Everything was gone, and I spent that day swimming in a lake of fire on the bed of my betrayer, drowning in loss, tired beyond explanation, angry beyond capacity, saddened beyond even death itself.
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, all I could do was howl like a madman. Shouting inconceivable expletives at the top of my lungs, wailing like a child, kicking and screaming, without even the ability to exhaust myself. The clock seemed just stuck on the wall, and each passing moment was pure and total agony.
I may not know what hell is like, but if there were ever a man who has lived it, I know his brand of pain. I've been at the brink of madness itself and seen the limits of what evil can do to a man's soul. I know what its like to lose everything, to hurt, to hate, to writhe.
But even more importantly, I know what it's like to come back.
I realized that the wrecking ball that I was was just as evil as the one wielded against me. I recognized that despite it all I still loved her, and that I would only be doing harm by acting in all my hate and rage. I saw the only solution to ending the hate was to abolish it first in myself. I realized that I hated where I was and that it wasn't right - that I never wanted anyone to feel what I did because it's not right, that what's right is that no one should go through that feeling, that our whole goal should be against the propagation of that kind of pain in general. I realized that night that I might never be able to completely forgive her, but I would try.
It's not hard to hate - hating itself is easy: it does all the work for you. What's hard to do is forgive. And forgiving them is the hardest thing I've ever done, but it's also the only reason I ever slept again and woke up the next day. The hate is what kept me awake. The hate is what drove me to kill and to destroy. And the only way to get rid of it is to forgive.
So I did.
That's what I learned on my seemingly years-long journey through hell that day - that the only way out of that inferno is to forgive, in any way possible, whether by force, necessity, or grace, even if you have to lie to yourself to do it. Personally, I chose to half-believe her lie that nothing happened. It was the only way to stop that turmoil, to cool those unquenchable fires, to even just temporarily quiet the screams in my head. And it's the only reason I'm capable of writing this to you now.
Today that's all well in the past. I left her the next morning and rebuilt my life from scratch.
But if you would have asked me that day I would've never believed it possible for me to be happy again, to find love again, to even enjoy anything again. Now that I look back on the situation I realize the depth of transformative change I experienced thereafter, how much it motivated me, aligned my goals, cleared and rarified my perspective. And though I don't think I could ever say I'm happy it happened to me, I'm surprisingly grateful for all I've gained from that trauma. If it hadn't happened I wouldn't be back in school, pursuing a dream that eclipses any I ever had before, writing a book I never imagined I'd actually endeavor into, living a life as rich with friends and family and experiencing joy on levels I never realized...
Despite all my doubt, things can always get better. We can always find new paths to happiness.
Each day is a new day, and it doesn't have to be filled with the fires we squelched the days before. The human mind is surprisingly resilient, so long as it remains focused on the future, and refuses to venture further into that cave of haunting hate which threatens to consume it whole...
The hardest thing in the world is to let it go. But if you're true about it and put your soul into that forgiving, trust me - you'll thank yourself later... No matter how long it takes...
Things weren't perfect, they never are, but they were great (even mind-blowingly spectacular) by my measure most times we were together, right up until we got engaged.
Something went wrong, she was afraid of the commitment, shied away, became reclusive, receded from the relationship.
Then, 6 months after we got engaged, I came back from seeing a friend of mine early. I wasn't supposed to be home until the next day, but thought my chances were better driving at night to make it back for work the next day than in the morning. My friend and I had been shooting that day (as was common sport in rural Indiana) and I was armed with some exceedingly nasty rounds in a gun I could shoot exceedingly accurate up to 50 yds, wearing-in a new holster I had just bought.
I came home, nothing seemed amiss. She was presumably asleep in bed. I put my gun down on the table just outside our room, too tired to put it completely away for the evening. We had no kids, the area was safe, she wasn't about to touch it, and having it at that table seemed nearly as good as putting it in a locked box at the time. I showered, brushed my teeth, and was in my boxers when I decided to climb into bed.
Stumbling into bed, I shone the dim front light of my phone on the covers, checking to see where she was so I didn't trample her as I crawled into my bed beside her. Saw her shape beneath. Lifted the covers to reveal her back facing me, naked.
When I had the funniest realization that I'll never forget. "Wait a minute," I thought, "that's not long hair!"
It's difficult to describe what it's like to experience the maximum possible amount of hatred and misery one could ever endure at one time, but that's precisely what built up in me the moment after I ran out of explanations which allowed me to deny what my eyes had just seen. I went through every possible combination of scenarios that could have occurred in order for my fiancé not to be sleeping with my best friend before the depth of that betrayal seeped into my veins.
It was like being filled with a white-hot, fiery, liquid rage so vivid, violent, and venomous that I could literally taste it as it coursed through my blood, leaked from my pores, ran down my face crusting in the salty corners of my mouth. Pure, unfiltered, unadulterated rage the likes of which I didn't know man was capable of oozed out of my very soul, poisoning me like mustard gas, choking my breath, churning my stomach.
They remained asleep there as I lifted my phone further up, finally revealing her aside Brutus, also seemingly naked. I dropped the sheet, ran to the bathroom, vomited. The room spun around me unhinged, like my soul. I felt like a human wrecking ball controlled by mindless apes, swinging violently in the air, threatening destruction of every life within my reach.
She was my love, my world, that which I had devoted myself to for 7 years, my entire adult life. She was everything to me that was important - my job, my house, my future. And there she was with Brutus. In my bed. With my friend that I trusted as much as her. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have not seen this coming?
I had to get the gun off the table, should he wake up and use it against me. I also had to not shoot them, or myself, or anyone else. As easy as that sounds, in that fit of rage, with that liquid hate pumping through me, in that maelstrom of misery and loathing, in my own very real personal hell it took every ounce of my being and more not to simply "cock the slide, pull the trigger" as it literally echoed in my head over and over and over again. It would have been that easy. It would have been just that simple to end their lives (or at least his). In retrospect, I'm thankful that the thought of shooting his penis off never occurred to me at the time because if it had, I almost certainly would have. The fact that I was engaged in the false dilemma of either killing or not killing was a virtual miracle of science that could have quite literally saved my life at that moment, so vivid was my ire...
I picked up the gun, dropped the magazine, entered the guest bedroom, put the gun in the cabinet, emptied the mag into my hand, put it and the bullets into separate drawers. And then I waited. It was all that I could do.
I know from experience that I can't drive when I'm angry. I also cannot drive when I'm tired. I was at the brink of my abilities upon arriving home, this could only exacerbate my lack of control. It was small-town Indiana. I had no friends I could call at 6 in the morning (except maybe the one who was lying in bed naked with my fiancé), there were no cabs, and there were no hotels in the town I was in. I was stuck for risk of killing myself or someone else on the road.
They wouldn't be awake until nearly 11.
So, in the guest bedroom, where he had stayed countless times before, I lay in a bed still unclean from when he last slept in it and writhed. And writhed. And writhed. And writhed. I'll still swear that each second in that bed that morning could have been a month. I wanted to sleep, to forget, to just simply end the pain but I could not, so fraught with madness and loathing as I was. There was no stopping it. The knife just kept twisting in my gut and there was no pulling it out. I tried making noise. I was throwing fits like a small child. I thought the blood might literally burst out of my face, hot and red like some horror film.
I could feel my very soul contorting inside me, willing me to put the bullets back in, to end it all any way I could. It was all over anyway. My whole life had been taken from me. I wasn't coming back from this. Everything was ruined. Everything was lost and worthless. And I was still reeling from the horror...
That was the longest day of my life. After she went to work around noon (and inexplicably "denying" the "incident") I remained in that bed wanting nothing more than to shrivel up and die. I quit the best job I ever had that day. I lost the greatest thing I ever loved. Everything was gone, and I spent that day swimming in a lake of fire on the bed of my betrayer, drowning in loss, tired beyond explanation, angry beyond capacity, saddened beyond even death itself.
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, all I could do was howl like a madman. Shouting inconceivable expletives at the top of my lungs, wailing like a child, kicking and screaming, without even the ability to exhaust myself. The clock seemed just stuck on the wall, and each passing moment was pure and total agony.
I may not know what hell is like, but if there were ever a man who has lived it, I know his brand of pain. I've been at the brink of madness itself and seen the limits of what evil can do to a man's soul. I know what its like to lose everything, to hurt, to hate, to writhe.
But even more importantly, I know what it's like to come back.
I realized that the wrecking ball that I was was just as evil as the one wielded against me. I recognized that despite it all I still loved her, and that I would only be doing harm by acting in all my hate and rage. I saw the only solution to ending the hate was to abolish it first in myself. I realized that I hated where I was and that it wasn't right - that I never wanted anyone to feel what I did because it's not right, that what's right is that no one should go through that feeling, that our whole goal should be against the propagation of that kind of pain in general. I realized that night that I might never be able to completely forgive her, but I would try.
It's not hard to hate - hating itself is easy: it does all the work for you. What's hard to do is forgive. And forgiving them is the hardest thing I've ever done, but it's also the only reason I ever slept again and woke up the next day. The hate is what kept me awake. The hate is what drove me to kill and to destroy. And the only way to get rid of it is to forgive.
So I did.
That's what I learned on my seemingly years-long journey through hell that day - that the only way out of that inferno is to forgive, in any way possible, whether by force, necessity, or grace, even if you have to lie to yourself to do it. Personally, I chose to half-believe her lie that nothing happened. It was the only way to stop that turmoil, to cool those unquenchable fires, to even just temporarily quiet the screams in my head. And it's the only reason I'm capable of writing this to you now.
Today that's all well in the past. I left her the next morning and rebuilt my life from scratch.
But if you would have asked me that day I would've never believed it possible for me to be happy again, to find love again, to even enjoy anything again. Now that I look back on the situation I realize the depth of transformative change I experienced thereafter, how much it motivated me, aligned my goals, cleared and rarified my perspective. And though I don't think I could ever say I'm happy it happened to me, I'm surprisingly grateful for all I've gained from that trauma. If it hadn't happened I wouldn't be back in school, pursuing a dream that eclipses any I ever had before, writing a book I never imagined I'd actually endeavor into, living a life as rich with friends and family and experiencing joy on levels I never realized...
Despite all my doubt, things can always get better. We can always find new paths to happiness.
Each day is a new day, and it doesn't have to be filled with the fires we squelched the days before. The human mind is surprisingly resilient, so long as it remains focused on the future, and refuses to venture further into that cave of haunting hate which threatens to consume it whole...
The hardest thing in the world is to let it go. But if you're true about it and put your soul into that forgiving, trust me - you'll thank yourself later... No matter how long it takes...
-Owen Skarpness
Cudos to that dude on his writing skills first of all. Not bad for a probably should be dead guy. But like, wow--talk about having your world rocked huh? I'm glad he left the chick the next day. Almost got pissed when he said he forgave her until I realized he meant he basically forgave her in spirit so he could move on rather than literally forgiving her and then being a bitch and staying (that's what I got out of it anyway). Good story but all I wanna do is hear her side now. Like was she even taking this kid seriously? Rule of thumb says that if you caught her cheating once she's probably done it like 5 different times. You KNOW she was getting it in at college while they were at separate schools. Probably getting pig roasted on the bang bus while this guy was doing 10 Hail Marys every night. I bet she came home and didn't have the girl balls to break it off so she just acted shady and distant all the time hoping she would wake up one day and he would have just vanished into thin air. Imagine how awkward the yes must have sounded to that proposal? Shit. That's the problem with girls, they are so afraid of conflict they can never just deal with shit straight up. Always gotta be cryptic and subliminal and shit. Let that be a lesson to you ladies: tell it like it is, especially to your boyfriend, cuz the longer you pussy out, the closer you are to getting a bullet to your forehead. Can't get over how lucky she was. Couldn't pick a worse time to cheat than when your fiance was just out shooting things for fun. And then she just straight up denies it in the morning? I would have blown out one of her ovaries for that line alone. On the other side, you gotta know that when your girl is acting funny it's for a reason bro. Can't ignore the warning signs. Can't cling to the fact that it's your first relationship and think that somehow makes you special. Nonetheless, if you're not gonna shoot her and your friend's face off, you at least gotta do some seriously scary shit. I don't know, slip a picture of him with a red X on his head into his wallet or something and write on the back "when you least expect it..." just so he wakes up every morning thinking in the back of his head "shit, this might be the day I open my front door and get my brains blown out." Maybe throw someone a couple bucks to drive by the kids house reallly slowly a couple times a week until he goes into the witness protection program. Nothing worse than living in fear.
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