Chapter 25 : Losing Control – Cannabis, Divorce, and Gangs

‘’To love is to let go, not because you’ve failed, but because you’ve learned who you’re meant to be.”

 — Dr. Annie Chen’s

4:44. The emerald glow of digits on his smartphone sliced through the velvety darkness. Like a star born in the void, it bathed Alex’s face in a ghostly green radiance, stirring him awake—no alarm, only the silent summons of time weaving into his soul, with an inexplicable sense of destiny. The bedroom was deathly still, save for the soft breathing of Antiga lying beside him.

Suddenly the voice: ‘’Leave her.’’

He was not in his ears, nor bound by the confines of his room, but woven into the heart of Alex’s essence—luminous, alien, yet hauntingly familiar. Alex began to listen intently as his heart pounded against his ribs, his body rising and stiffening with each thud, the sheets clinging, heavy, still sweat-soaked from the fervent lovemaking hours earlier. The voice carried neither anger nor judgment—only pure truth, slowly beginning to melt the illusions nurtured for nineteen years.

‘’Leave her.!’’

He slowly turned his head, tracing Antiga’s profile, softened by a spectral haze that seeped through the curtains. The scene felt unearthly, like a psychedelic dream. A heavy silence gripped the air, laced with an eerie, intangible presence that coiled around the room, drifting through the windows like a murmured enigma. Her face, serene in the strange, otherworldly stillness, bore no hint of the fury that had consumed her during their stormy clash hours earlier in the kitchen. His admission of losing his job at Five Guys Cardiff Bay had been a mere spark—but when he confessed to prostitutes and years of marital betrayal, her rage had erupted like a volcano. Then, in an unexpected twist of actions that shook him to his core, she hurled her confession amidst the shattered plates strewn across the kitchen floor and the overturned chairs.

“I had an affair too,” she confessed.

The emotional anguish struck him like a searing, unrelenting burst of flame, clawing at Alex’s heart. Yet he remained stoic, swallowing the pain like a man resigned to his fate. His quiet “I deserved this” was a calm surrender to the weight of his betrayals. The venom of their anger transformed into a desperate, aching longing that bloomed into raw, breath-stealing passion. It overtook the kitchen table, dishes and fragments pushed aside in the flood of unrestrained desire. Their bodies collided like waves against a collapsing shore, tangled amid the wreckage of shattered plates, as if trying to mend—or obliterate—a wound neither could name. In the bedroom, their union became a wordless lament, their bodies speaking a fragile, burning language of love and loss that stretched deep into the night.

Leave her.!

The voice echoed again, and this time Alex noticed his hands had stopped trembling. His rushed heartbeats slowed down. An unsettling calm took its place as the panic subsided. He'd heard about moments of clarity—those rare instances when the fog of habit and fear lifts, revealing a truth so obvious you wonder how you ever missed it. This was his moment.

The clock changed to 4:45.

One minute had passed.  That's all it took to understand what he'd been avoiding for so many years. Their passionate outburst hadn't been reconciliation—it had been a goodbye. Their relationship had long since died, and they'd just been too stubborn, too afraid and too emotionally attached to the cause and the effect.  In that moment, the full swing of realization filled his whole being: it was time to grow up and let things go.

Alex’s new job in the warehouse became another vital thread in his fragile recovery, each shift a quiet defiance against his unraveling past, yet his heart ached with the knowledge that he stood with one foot already beyond the marriage, stepping tentatively toward a future he could barely envision. Four hours daily of scanning packages under humming fluorescent lights, each mechanical beep marking time like a metronome counting down to the descending financial ruin. Between scans, his mind never stopped calculations: credit card payments, his upcoming official bankruptcy declaration, Anatig’s car installments, bankruptcy lawyer fees and the dwindling savings that was no longer there and marriage that was never meant to be.

Suddenly, his phone lit up with a text from Ray, his friend and best weed supplier in town. Got that organic indica you like. Come by the new place. New place? Alex's scanner froze mid-beep. He'd watched Ray's progression over the past year—from a modest rented apartment to that sprawling Victorian in Roath Park. Last week, Ray had pulled up in a brand-new Range Rover Sport, casually mentioning something about "agricultural investments" while showing Alex his new home theatre system. The scanner resumed its rhythm as Dr. Chen's voice continued through his earbuds, discussing attachment pattern teories. However, Alex's thoughts strayed to their conversation from a month ago in Ray's meticulously maintained vegetable and herb garden. "It's all about organic growing methods," Ray had said, his eyes carrying a wisdom beyond casual gardening talk. "Right team, right setup—you could clear your debts in six months. Think about it.  I’m not making any promises here…but if you give love to the plant, it will give you love back."

Alex thought about it very hard, back to scanning. The podcast shifted to discussing love languages, and Alex's throat tightened. While he'd tried showing love through acts of service and doing everything he could for his family. Joining the Royal Blind Association in Cardiff as a volunteer, working food delivery after hours and trying to maintain their home. Anatig craved words of affirmation, physical touch and security. Something that was very foreign to him. Now both their languages had devolved into silence, accusations and despair. Arguments only about money and security. Between each scan, each label, each box moved, the numbers danced in his head. Ray's "team" cleared more in a month than Alex made in a year. The same amount that could give him a fresh start. The psychology podcast droned on about "conscious uncoupling" while Alex's thoughts tangled between survival and morality. What is the right thing to do. The inner turmoil was taking over his thought process. He'd always tried to be the careful one, the legal one. The nice guy. But watching Ray put down payments on houses while he was about to face homelessness, this mental mastrubation stirred something desperate in him. His scanner beeped red—misaligned barcode.

Alex stared at his scanner's screen, the red light reflecting a combination of random numbers, 5687033555938888.  This was probably a sign. Dr. Chen's voice discussed how relationship patterns echo childhood wounds—how we recreate familiar pain in relationships when we're desperate. His finger hovered over Ray's message while the podcast explored trauma bonds and attachment styles.

Like his moral compass, shaky between right and wrong, survival and death. All his life oscillated between shadows and light, choices made in the dark and revelations under the sun. Another text from Ray: "The team's expanding soon. Opportunity's there if you want it." As he stared at the message, sometimes survival meant dancing with shadows. He typed back, "Let's talk," not knowing he'd just scanned his way into something far darker than warehouse inventory. His next message to Ray was more decisive: "I'm in," reflecting his inner turmoil, while Dr. Chen explained how desperate people often mistake new cages for escape routes.

On Thursdays, a single day each week, Alex found refuge from these shadows. He dedicated himself fully to the Cardiff Royal Blind Association, where, whatever time was required, he was there. In the grounds of Cardiff, a sanctuary of paradox emerged—where guiding those who couldn't see helped him finally glimpse his own truth. Thursday evenings transformed the ancient stones into something more than cold pavement and walls—they became witnesses to a different kind of awakening.

What began as a simple suggestion to move book discussions outdoors evolved into a profound ritual of mutual discovery. The castle's weathered walls stood sentinel as Alex learned to translate the visual world for others, unknowingly translating his own inner landscape in the process. Jenny, with sixty-three years of sightless wisdom, didn't just ask for descriptions of sunsets—she taught him to see beauty in its purest form. Her white cane tapping against cobblestones became a metronome for his own stumbling steps toward clarity. He couldn't help but notice the irony: while describing how evening light painted the castle walls in amber and rose, how shadows pirouetted across ancient gardens, he was learning to illuminate his own darkness. Each carefully planned route, each consideration of ground texture and acoustic landmarks, reflected his emerging understanding of emotional navigation.  The group's fingers tracing stone creatures on the animal wall mirrored his own blind exploration of feelings he'd long suppressed. Alex had to face his own emotional blindness in these circumstances, where those who had mastered blind navigation were all around him. His marriage had become a darkened room he'd fumbled through, bumping against furniture he refused to acknowledge, mistaking walls for doors. While helping others create mental maps of their physical world, he began charting the territory of his own heart.

The "Zero Degrees" pub became their Norman keep, where Welsh cakes and Wordsworth's poetry flowed freely. As Alex read "The World Is Too Much With Us," his voice carrying the anguish of newfound understanding, he recognized how he'd been sleeping through his own life. The group's attentive silence held more truth than years of hollow conversations with Anatig.

            Jenny's observation about Alex sounding "more alive" during these sessions struck a chord that resonated through his hollow marriage. In guiding others through physical darkness, he'd stumbled upon his own light. These Thursday evenings became more than volunteer work—they were waypoints in his journey from emotional blindness toward clarity. Each session marked not time spent away from his crumbling marriage but steps toward authentic connection with himself. The castle grounds, with their centuries of silent witness, taught him that sometimes those who navigate by touch see more clearly than those who rely on sight. His role as guide became a profound metaphor for his own journey—learning that the path forward often requires trusting senses beyond the visual, feeling one's way through darkness toward truth. In the end, these evenings revealed that he'd been the one truly in need of guidance. While offering his eyes to others, they had given him something far more valuable: the courage to feel his way toward authenticity, to trust that some paths become clear only when we stop trying to see them.

Alex began to see clearer and clearer how false and foreign his life was; neither Anatig nor any of his friends wanted to listen to or understand why he was volunteering for blind people. The looks on their faces reflected all he needed to know.

That single word carried nineteen years of disappointment. “Enough,” Alex said to himself. I can't live like this, surrounded with people who are the dearest and closest, but feel so foreign. Alex felt Anatig suffering, but he didn't know how much.  Alex made the painful decision to let it all go, even if it meant becoming homeless. He texted Ray to come pick him up saying, I’m ready to meet the team.  He went downstairs, where he had sat two black rubbish bin bags packed with clothes and personal items.

"Anatig, I need to tell you something,” Alex said while descending downstairs. Vilhelm, from his room, also followed him, intuitively knowing something was up.

"Tell me what? That you've failed again? That you can't keep a simple warehouse job?" Anatig's voice sounded in resentful frustration.  "That all of your grand aspirations to write and transform the world are rendered meaningless when we are unable to pay our bills?" At that very moment, Vilhelm tried to insert himself, ''Can you both stop shouting at each other?''

"At least I'm trying to build something!" Alex advanced into the kitchen, his control slipping. "While you sit in your comfort zone, pretending to be a wife. Is there anything else you know how to do apart from cleaning the house? Alex was not having another disrespect! “Judging every move I make, poisoning Vilhelm's mind against me—never forget…all that I did, I did for us,” Alex's voice shook with deep rising frustration within.

"Don't you dare bring him into this!" Anatig snapped.

"Why not? You do! Every time I stumble, you make sure he sees his father as a failure!" Kitchen table trembled as Alex pushed past it, closing the distance between them.

"You want to know what I really lost today?” Alex shouted.

"What? Anatig shouted back with a smirk.

“My self-respect.'' Alex continued, "I realized I spent 19 years with someone who never loved me, only expected things and stuff!" Alex's frustration was rising. "Have you ever approached me, hugged me, and said, 'I love you'? Have you ever!? Every time I was only hearing about the extent to which I failed to fulfill my obligations to you by not being jealous enough, or seeing your new hairstyle, or your new dress to impress, not enough for Vilhelm as a father, and not enough for this residence as a man, not enough lover in bed!” Alex continued without pause. “Let me ask you this,” he continued aggressively. “Was I ever enough anywhere in your life? Was I good enough for anything to you or your family?”

Alex noticed Anatig's stunned face. The truth fucking hurts, and it brings all the darkest inner demons out as long as you allow it.

Anatig's silence broke and the smirk she wore dissolved. Words cut deeper than the sharpest of swords on the planet. No emotion, only a pure Kill Bill moment from the iconic Quentin Tarantino movie.

"Nineteen years, Alex. Nineteen years I've felt violated every time we're having sex!"  Right there, Alex felt his manhood smashed, not like glass, but like a grape crushed underfoot—leaving nothing but a wet, hollow smear. The bleak, gut-wrenching realization hit him—for 19 years, he had raped his wife, over and over, without understanding. Is that how she felt all these years? The mass of this truth dropped on him like an iron anvil, suffocating and relentless. It was a blow no man should ever endure, a searing self-awareness that stripped away every layer of pride, leaving only raw, agonizing regret.

The kitchen fell into deep silence except for their ragged breathing. The accusation thrown around still floating in the air, echoing in their heads, seeping into every corner of the house they'd shared countless meals in, celebrated birthdays, friend’s gatherings, Christmases and built a life in that seemed so perfect until it was not.

Anatig, frustrated and hurt, continued …

"This is my house, her voice dropping to a deadly calm. "Get out."

Alex stood very still, the fury draining from him, replaced by an eerie clarity.  He looked around at the chaos they'd created— out of place chairs, a table skidded, broken dreams littering the floor, Vilhelm in tears on the stairs to his room he saw their relationship for what it truly was: a battleground where they'd both lost.

"And now you even call this your house?" His voice cracked with emotion. "Branding me as a villain in front of our son every single time we argue?"

The pain of being portrayed as the family's antagonist to Vilhelm was yet another Kill Bill moment, where the broken pieces could and would never fit together again.

"Who do you think made this life possible for you here in Cardiff?" Alex's voice rose with years of fury. "I spent almost a year living in a box just to save enough money while you and Vilhelm were in Lithuania. I saved enough money to bring you both here!  I made enough to rent a beautiful house for us, two cars, and to take a holiday every year."  His hands shaking in folded fists as the memories flooded back—the sacrifices, the lonely nights, the endless work—all for a dream of perfect family life that was now broken beyond any and all repair.

"Who sorted out all the paperwork and took care of everything for you and Vilhelm?" The words tumbled out faster now, years of unacknowledged sacrifice spilling into the open. "You didn't even know how to speak English!"

Anatig stood rigid, her face red and eyes almost out of the sockets, wearing a grueling a mask of defiance, but Alex wasn't finished. The truth he'd held back for so long demanded to be heard.  " But you're right," he said finally. "It is your house. And I'm done fighting for a place I never belonged in the first place…oh, and just so you know, you have full ownership of your car. I completely paid it off, and nobody can take it from you.  Also, your credit card is paid off too.”

Alex did everything to leave his family without any of his shadows because he knew he would be filling out bankruptcy paperwork soon.

"Don't forget you still have your son and responsibilities to him,” she reminded him with a bit more ease in her voice now—as if he would ever forget.

'Don't worry,' Alex said while pointing at the full car ownership registration documents on the kitchen window—through which he saw Ray approaching. His phone buzzed with a text:

I’m outside.

 “Have I ever failed to provide for Vilhelm?”

Alex took his shoes, threw them in the rubbish bag, his old laptop and his jacket. He went to say goodbye to Vilhelm, but he ran upstairs and slammed the doors in his room. When Alex came up and knocked at his door.

“Go away! I don't want to see you!” shouted his son.

Alex turned around with eyes full of tears, feeling a complete and utter failure as a father. He felt a real physical pain in his heart while descending downstairs. He grabbed his two black rubbish bags packed with his belongings and went outside. The moment he opened the door, he said to Anatig, ''I cannot believe I spent 19 years with such a cold-hearted person.''

The realization that neither of them knew how to love was crystal clear to Alex.

As he loaded his bags into Ray’s waiting Range Rover, Alex felt the tonnage of nineteen years lift.

Never ever again, he promised himself. 

But that wasn't just about leaving—it was a promise to himself about the man he would become. The dark blue vehicle with its tinted windows represented more than escape—it was his moving portal to reinvention.  As he entered the car Ray greeted him.

“Friday…we meet the team…but now…we go to the new project house.”

NEXT WEEK! Chapter 26 : The House of Shadow

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