I don’t know what just happened. We went out for coffee, me suggesting that we talk having spent maybe a fortnight carefully thinking about something he’d asked me.

We’re in this coffee shop and I’m talking and checking my notes, and he’s there shaking his head. When I finish, he was angry and I got a full broadside. Boom!

Completely unexpected, my shields were down as I had thought that what I said would be met with warmth, as I’d taken care to be both honest and caring. What a miscalculation!

I know that I have hurt him, which I (thought) I’d acknowledged in what is said. However, that seems to mean that I am not entitled to feel hurt by the ways he has been with me, nor may I feel pain at the distance between us. Only he is allowed to feel. It seems to me that had always been the way in our marriage.

As happens when I’m emotionally overwhelmed (I had to refrain from saying “attacked”, because I do not know, in all fairness, if that’s what happened), my brain went to glue, the racing thoughts all jammed up, and the shutdown happened. I couldn’t move, I could barely speak.

The noise of the coffee shop, whilst always loud as the baristas grind the beans and the customers attempt to be heard over it, became too much. My ears hurt as well as my heart.

Just to make this even harder, what little processing my head was able to do was given over to various forms of James Horner “danger” themes all looping and merging one into the other.

I know that he told me that I was controlling and selfish. That I was “playing the victim”, if that is the case, then I allege that he was relishing in “playing the persecutor”.

I couldn’t disappear into myself, not here in a coffee shop where it wasn’t safe – I had to do something to fight my way back to this moment.

I brought myself halfway back by scratching myself all over and hitting myself with spoons.

I know that I cried at one point.

I know that I said “this isn’t working, is it?”. I know that he agreed, and then went on to say that it was him that was going to lose everything. He says that I’d groomed him to be a doormat.

I was able to drive home, however I wouldn’t say that I was “safe” to drive, but we had to get home somehow.

I remember him saying that he knew that I would go upstairs and hide for a while before coming down to make tea. So I sat in a chair in the lounge and – I don’t know how else to say it – gave into it. I stupidly denied myself any soothing, and my head is killing me and I’m am emotional wreck.

I’m feeling incredibly sad and quite sorry for myself now.

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At home, when I came home from walking the dog, which I make into a longer walk because I need the space, husband said that he wished to continue the discussion.

He asked me to be more logical and to put aside emotion now: he wanted to move out and I need to make that happen. What was the quickest way to achieve that.

Smack! That hurt.

I told him that if we sold the house, that he would have to wait an unknown amount of time for a buyer – and the house still needs a lot of work doing to it.

The quickest way would be for me to buy him out. Would he like to use the valuations from 2023 when I was looking at buying him out previously, or get new ones? He said her new ones. When I asked him to arrange them, he told me that I should do it because I was buying him out. He must have thought about it some more, because if I organise it I will have to work from home more to show them around, and he wouldn’t be happy with that. So he’s agreed to me looking at what the housing market has done in the last year and modify the valuations based on that.

So I’m to start the process with the bank of buying him out tomorrow.

He went to bed before 8pm. In in bed just after 9pm.

What a day.