Early one morning while he was in the shower getting ready for work, I found myself unable to sleep through a nagging urge. For the last several weeks I had noticed a black and white speckled composition book laying near, around, and half-way under the bed and the urge to peak inside it finally consumed me.
There was no cause for suspicion; I trusted him completely and had no notions of jealousy. But I am inquisitive to a fault and that morning I was pushed to the limits of my curiosity.
In a hasty ethical black-out, I reached beneath the bed and found my fingers grasping at his notebook. Sifting swiftly past a few pages I saw scribbled songs, juvenile poetry and long page-spanning entries. My search for the unknown suddenly halted when I came upon on a letter. "Dear Erin," it read. It was the name that first caught my eye, because it's my mom's. "Dear Erin," he began, "I miss you and the way you always smelled like vanilla," he continued.
A panicked rambling interrogation went on silently in my head: Who is this girl? Where did she come from? When had he ever come close enough to catch a whiff of her? What about her and her scent was so alluring and still haunting him today?
Before I could be caught red-handed and teary-eyed, I snapped the notebook shut and slid it back beneath the shadowed edge of the bed.
Those words in his handwriting are forever ingrained on my brain, etched there like scarlet letters symbolizing my shameful trespassing. I had been trusted to be alone with his personal space and I went ahead and invaded it. All I had to show for this indecent indiscretion, was a paranoid fixation on some fictional evil temptress called Erin and her slutty vanilla body spray.
Though it can seem exciting to become privy to someone else's classified information, knowing something I shouldn't is just too much information for me. I'm not good at keeping my game face on, I'm awful at hiding my emotions and I'm hell-bent on over-analyzing and oversharing nearly every thought to pop into my head. With that kind of a combo already going on, add the shame and guilt of snooping and I am a wreck!
Opening that notebook was the wrong thing to do. Going through someone's things is a bad decision. That decision was the defining moment that began the end of that relationship. Reading those words somehow flipped a switch inside me that took me from the safe and content girl in love to an obsessive, suspicious, jealous girl second guessing my every move. I don't like the latter me and I only had myself to blame for creating her.
Snooping is derived from insecurity and from this event I know that it brings out and exploits the very worst, most insecure version of me. It does more harm than good. It is a bad decision and I had to learn the hard way from it.
This is why I will never go through your things.
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