The Honeymoon of My Nightmares

Last night, I read the journal entries from my honeymoon for the first time. I still feel sick today.

If you’d asked me about my honeymoon back when I was still married, I would have given you a glowing report of the austere beauty of Edinburgh and our decadent hotel suite, which looked like it came straight out of a Harry Potter movie. I’d have gone on and on about our days driving through the Cotswolds and making stops for sticky buns and rambles through fairy tale-like fields dotted with sheep. I would have told you all about our cross-country train ride, which cut through the heart of Sherwood Forest, and rhapsodized over our elegant dinner at Nobu in London. I would have sworn it was the honeymoon of my dreams. In some ways, it was.

But it was also the honeymoon of my nightmares, and a major indicator of what the next 20 years of my life would look like. I kept that part of the story to myself.

In fact, it wasn’t until I sat down to write this post that I realized I had managed to scrub most of the bad parts of the honeymoon from my mind entirely — I still remember well the feelings of shock and horror I experienced that week, but I could only remember bits and pieces of what actually caused those emotions to occur.

And so I unearthed my journals, which had been stowed away in a box in the back of the attic until I managed to get them back earlier this year. I couldn’t remember if I’d written anything during my honeymoon, but I figured it was worth checking — and sure enough, I found a few entries from that week, written in a scrawl that told me they had to have been entered in secret from a closet or bathroom. I read them last night for the first time in two decades. And today, I feel sick from the experience. Physically ill.