My life fell apart without me noticing. That’s how it felt to me. Everything was fabulous, then it wasn’t. Looking back, I should have seen it happening. Ha, I bet everyone says that, right?
Here’s the thing. The woman I love, the woman I married and had two beautiful daughters with, fell in with a new group of friends. It was after the lockdowns started easing and folk started going out more. These friends were all about ten to fifteen years younger than her. Nothing wrong with that, right? I’m not ageist or anything. Nothing wrong with having friends ten years younger (not after a certain age, I mean. Obviously if you’re, like, eighteen and your friends are ten years younger then you have some problems!)
The problem was that ten years was the difference between having a kid and a settled life, and being young free and single. I don’t know what age you are, Joshua (older than me I’m guessing, ‘cause I know you’ve been doing your spell work for more than forty years), but I reckon people who came into the world ten years after you probably don’t see it exactly the way you do.
That’s how it was with Sharon. Her new friends didn’t have kids demanding help with their homework, or needing to be taxied about to their different after school activities. They didn’t have parents association meetings. They didn’t have to fit their lives around their families, because most of them didn’t have families. They were going out clubbing and dating. And they took Sharon with them.
Now don’t get me wrong, I was happy for her to go with them. My wife worked hard bringing up our daughters, and by the time the youngest was just starting school I was super happy for her to get some time to do stuff for herself. Every time her friends took her out she would come back looking radiant. Like she did when we first met.
Looking back now, I can pinpoint the time the other man — I’ll call him Gary — came into her life. There was something truly different about her when she came back from that particular night out. Like, a distance between us. Not a big distance, not by a long stretch. But something had changed. It was like an invisible barrier had been put up.
That barrier got bigger as the weeks rolled on. Sharon went from just going out on the weekend to going out two or three times a week. When she said she was going away for a weekend I was surprised, but I said great, why not? You deserve it. I’ll look after the girls. We’ll watch movies and eat pizza and pretend like we’re on vacation. I really should have seen what was going on, shouldn’t I?
What I know now, and what should have been so obvious at the time, was she was going away with Gary. She had met him in a bar. Encouraged by her young, free and single friends, she had gone out with him, slept with him, and now she was going away with him for — let’s call it what it was — a dirty weekend.
Like I said, Joshua, I was slow and didn’t know any of this at the time. So when a month or two later she told me she was leaving us, it was more than a smack in the face. It was devastating.
My first priority was the girls. Sharon was going, but my beautiful daughters were staying. That was a blessing all right, but I work full time and though I always did more than my fair share of looking after the kids, taking them on solo was something els. So for the first few months I didn’t have time to wallow in depression or feel sorry for myself or none of that. All my time was taken up looking after them. I’m very lucky that my parents are both still around and not far away, and they were happy to help.
Anyhow, after maybe six months of this it started to hit me properly. Not the being alone, but the fact I missed Sharon so much. My parents didn’t understand it. They said that bitch left you with the kids, left her own kids without a mother. You don’t want anything to do with her no more. Good riddance.
But the truth of it, Joshua, is I never stopped loving Sharon, and I wanted her back with all my heart. I know she would never have gone and left us if it wasn’t for the influence of her friends.
The first thing I did was the obvious thing. I called Sharon and begged her to come back. I said I knew she had made a mistake and it was okay, we would welcome her back with open arms. No hard feelings, etc etc.
She slammed the door in my face. Metaphorically I mean. She said she was happier with Gary than she ever remembers being with me. And she said a whole lot more besides, about how great the sex was, how he treated her like a princess and made her feel young again. I won’t lie to you, Joshua, it hurt to hear her say those things.
But none of that stopped me from loving her. I could forgive and forget. She was my princess, not Gary’s. She was the mother of our kids, the pillar of our family. I needed her back.
I tried writing her. I sent flowers, all the usual stuff. I didn’t try poetry or writing her a song to serenade her because I’m no poet or musician, but I think I tried almost everything else.
It was desperation that brought me to you, Joshua. I don’t want that to sound like a bad thing, ‘cause what you did for me changed my life. I guess what I mean is that I’d done everything I could think of save casting a magic spell on her. It was when I had that thought — of a magic spell — that I looked you up. I’ve always had an open mind about these things, so when I saw your page and read your story I knew I had found my answer.
I filled out your form and waited. You know what? Even though it took most of the day for you to get back to me, I felt this weird inner calm. I hadn’t felt that calm since Sharon left. But deep inside, I felt like everything was going to work out. Stupid really, all I’d done was ask for your help — you hadn’t even answered me yet!
As you know, you did answer later that day, and you said you were going to help me. I had to wait a couple of days because you're a popular guy! That was okay, I knew it would be worth it.
And boy was it worth it. You did all the work. The hardest part for me, you said, would be staying positive. But that was easy as pie. I had that calm feeling throughout. Even after you did the spell and said I would have to wait a while to see the effect in Sharon, I had no trouble staying positive.
It helps that I had the girls. They were keeping me busy as anything so truth be told it was no effort to put Sharon out of my mind for a bit and concentrate on my kids. My parents thought I must be over Sharon ‘cause I stopped talking about her. But I never stopped loving her.
The first sign of the spell working was a strange one. Sharon texted me to say she wanted to pick up some of her stuff from the house. Now I know to some that might sound all backwards, like things were getting worse because she was making more commitment to leave by taking her stuff away, but I could see the truth of it. This was the first time she had made contact with me. She was reaching out. She was going to come to the house — our house — for the first time since leaving us. That could only be a good thing!
Even so, I said she had to come when the girls were at school. I figured this was only the start and she wasn’t likely to move in right away. This was a tentative step forward. I didn’t want the kids getting their hopes up that she was back for good. I knew what was happening, but I couldn’t explain that to them.
So anyhow, the day came, and Sharon came to the house as planned. She didn’t bring Gary, which was a good sign. What was not so good was how she talked do me, like I was some shit on her shoe or something. She packed a bag with the stuff she wanted and left soon after.
I wasn’t discouraged. I knew she wasn’t going to suddenly change her feelings just like that. I know some people believe in love at first sight and all that, but I believe that’s more like lust at first sight. I believe that real love takes time to grow. Sharon still loved me deep down, I truly believed that. And I knew your spell was making her love me all over again. But I also knew it would take time for her to realise that.
The next time she texted me it was to meet for coffee. She said she felt bad that there was all this bad feeling between us and that she wanted to make things right. That was a huge change, and that time I suggested the girls came too. I wasn’t using them. Okay, maybe I was a little bit! It was important to me that Sharon see the whole family, not just me.
We met up and to see the girls with their mother filled me with so much joy, Joshua. I admit my first thought in doing this spell was for myself and my own love for Sharon, but it was for the girls too. For the whole family.
We spent the whole afternoon together, and it was like we were a proper family again, right until the time Sharon had to go. The girls cried, so I took them away quickly and didn’t let the scene drag on. The last thing Sharon needed was to feel like I was using our daughters to emotionally blackmail her.
It took another few weeks for things to turn around completely. In that time we met up a couple of times a week — sometimes with the girls, mostly without. It was those times without, when it was just the two of us, that I saw the biggest changes. I saw how she looked at me, and I saw the love in her eyes. Even if she wasn’t ready to admit it to her own self yet, I could see it was there.
And admit it she did. Finally. We were saying goodbye after a coffee together, just before I was to fetch the girls from school, and it all came out. All the things I had longed to hear, she said them to me. About what a mistake it had been to leave. About how ashamed she felt. Could I ever forgive her? Of course I could! I put a finger to her lips and said we never had to speak about it again.
Sharon moved home that weekend. And we haven’t really spoken about it since. The girls have asked her why she left, of course they have. She told them that she had been called away on an emergency and was sorry she hadn’t seen them for so long. I don’t know that they believed her — kids are smart — but they were so happy to have her back that they didn’t ask again.
None of this would have been possible without your spell, Joshua. It’s not just the spell itself I want to thank you for, but your communication throughout. That people like you exist gives me hope in humanity. Again, thank you.
