Phone bills and secret mode

Ok,
Tonight's one of those nights when I just got shit I got to get off my chest. No bones about it. No special reason or anything. Quite the contrary. The ex and I have been talking on the phone a lot lately and are actually getting along good. But I have all this shit inside that bubbles up to the top. And I'm afraid if I bring it up to her, it'll just start all the bad shit over again. How many times did I just say shit? Sheesh

Towards the end of 2003, when my marriage was slowly grinding to an agonizing halt, and my wife had gone into what a friend refers to as "secret mode", I decided to do a little snooping. Before you start flaming me, know this: in the last couple of months of our marriage, my wife began to read my email behind my back and confronted me about emails I had sent to a friend concerning the deteriorating state of the marriage. My wife and I had separate email accounts, and I had nothing to hide from her. But it really chapped my ass that she saw fit to snoop on me when she was the one running around, hiding things from me, staying out all night, screwing around with other guys and generally forsaking her wedding vows. She had become about as hypocritical as a person can get.

So that's why I started snooping. I guess you can say it was in retaliation for her snooping on me. For several months I had not seen a single cell phone bill. She got home from work before I did and always got the mail first. I knew she was paying the cell phone bill, so I didn't really think too much about it. Then my mind started working on me. So while she was in Iowa for the Christmas holidays (she decided to go see her family, and asked me not to come! ha! imagine that) low and behold I got the cell phone bill. I opened it and you know how the cell phone bill has every call, incoming and outgoing itemized right there in black and white. I started checking the numbers. I pretty much knew all of them but one. I plugged it into a people search web-site, and damn if it wasn't her ex-boyfriend.
The man she had lived with for 6 years before we met.
The man she had refered to for almost 4 years as "The Blob, The Jerk, The Asshole, The Prick, The Dumbass, The Moron .... you get the picture. In all, there were 23 calls to and from this jerk-off in the month of December. Over 300 hours of talk time. Most calls lasted over an hour and were between the hours of 12:00am and 2:00am. Unbelievable.
Even more unbelievable, you know what she said when I confronted her with the bill? When she finally returned from her trip? The trip which she probably spent a large portion of with him? She said, "There's nothing going on. He's just a friend. Someone I can talk to. We have a long history and we understand each other."
Right.
The guy who once shot her cat with a handgun in the front yard, just because it annoyed him (luckily, the cat survived!).
The guy who used several newsgroup search programs to comb porn newsgroups for binaries (pics and movies) and download them into elaborate folders on his computer ... and then showed them to her!
The guy who stopped at the local strip joint on the way home from work and then would get so blotto, he would call her to come pick him up.
The guy who occassionally brought home a stripper or two to their house!
The guy who made over 70 grand a year, owned his house free and clear (it was a family farm) but made her pay all the bills if she "wanted to keep living there."
The guy who continuously asked her to make her young daughter stay at her dad's, because he didn't like having kids around.
The guy who when he found out we were seeing each other, which was months after they broke up, emailed me a link to his home-based business website which sold stun guns and then threatened to come down to NC and hold a stun gun on my nuts! ( I still wish I had forwarded that email to the Cedar Rapids, Iowa sheriff's department).

What a history, eh?
Yeah ... they "understand each other."

Give me one big, fucking break.

Why is it, that women almost universally will break their own backs to stay with, or run back to a complete loser like that ... but will drop the guy who treats them like a queen in a heartbeat if he so much as looks cross-eyed at them.
I just don't freakin' understand it.

To this day I have no idea if what she told me was the truth. Any of it. For all I know, none of the shit she said about him was true! Although, since I did receive that infamous email myself, I can attest to the fact that Bob Willia, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is one big, bloated, pig-faced jerk off!
Too bad I'm so much of a pussy ... or I'd email the bastard a link to this page. I have his email address to this day.

So this brings me again, to that mental battle ... namely, why in the hell would I even entertain for a second trying to get her back? After all the shit? And that's just part of it. Other stuff I haven't even talked about and might not! So why do I wake up at night with my heart racing, then cry myself back to sleep? Why do I sit around at work and ache for her touch?
Isn't it enough that she completely fucked me over? Can't I hold on to the anger and resentment? Embrace it and just flat out hate her for the rest of my life? Wouldn't that make it easier to just walk away?

The answer .... is no.
Remember all that talk about Forgiveness?
If I ever truly want to be free. I have to get it all out. All the ugliness. All the betrayal. All the hurt. I have to confront it myself.

And I have to let it go.

Period

Oh Lord, it is oh so hard.
Oh so hard.