I spent months dragging him to specialists. I made appointments with neurologists, therapists, and endocrinologists. I was convinced something had broken inside his brain. The man who used to dance with me in the kitchen and leave sticky notes on the bathroom mirror had vanished, replaced by a cold, hollow shell.
The doctors found nothing. His scans were clean. His blood work was perfect.
I couldn’t understand it. He didn’t have a medical condition; he just decided to forget us.
It was a slow, deliberate erasure. After 15 years, he started treating me like a roommate he barely liked. He stopped asking about my day. He stopped touching me. If I walked into a room, he would walk out, not with anger, but with the casual indifference of a stranger on a subway platform. We shared a mortgage and a bed, but we were miles apart.
One Tuesday night, I finally cracked. I found him sitting on the patio, staring at the fence. I stood in the doorway, tears streaming down my face, shaking with the grief of losing him while he was sitting right there.
“Mark,” I sobbed. “Where are you? Where is the man I married? I miss him. Please, just tell me where my husband went.”
He turned his head slowly. There was no flicker of recognition, no spark of empathy.
When I cried and asked where my husband went, he looked at me with dead eyes.
He didn’t reach out to comfort me. He didn’t apologize. He delivered the eulogy for our marriage with a terrifying calmness.
“‘That version of me doesn’t exist anymore,’” he said flatly. “‘Stop looking for him.’“.
I froze. He spoke of his past self—the man who loved me, the man who built this life—as if he were a character in a book he had finished reading and thrown away. He hadn’t changed; he had rebooted. He had simply decided that he was done being that person, and my pain was just an inconvenience to his new operating system.
We lived together for another six months, but I was living with a corpse. The legal documents that came later were just a formality. He divorced me emotionally years before he signed the papers. He had checked out, packed up his soul, and left the building long before he actually walked out the door, leaving me to haunt the empty rooms of a life he had decided never happened.
