I AM 27. Dear love, I am a terrible wife.
I don’t love my husband the way I did before.
I saturate with guilt. I feel I have committed an awful betrayal, one I’m trying desperately to undo, to return my heart to its original tick.
Only you know about us. You are my one confidante. Were I to tell Momma and Dad, they’d say, “Leave. Come here.”
I wouldn’t go. I have my young but promising trajectory. Dad says I have an uncanny ability to work, give, and achieve far more than a normal, healthy person could under normal, healthy conditions. Such is the blessed training from a childhood and industry like mine, and years spent anorexic. I’ve learned to live on very little. But what would be possible were I not living a starved life? So much of my day is spent buffering and calming his storm. What would I discover if freed of him? Who could I be?
I’m grotesque. Dreaming of a life without him feels like I’m cheating.
“Honey, I want to write a book one day. I think there’s one inside me.”
He laughs. “That’s pretty presumptuous, baby. Stick to the comedy.”
Quietly I work, his opinion exactly that: his. His oblivion is a an illness I cannot contract. You and I have inborn and life-honed immunity. Everything I earn goes toward our bills, but I’ve started keeping money aside. I continue acting classes. I start improv and sketch writing classes. I secure a spec-contract and music producer for my first song. I keep recording pages on my laptop, sent from the ether. I work, silently, tirelessly, trying to kill the suspicion that I will live a smaller life should I remain his wife.
I once marveled at our love. Now I loathe our ugliness. The other day, during a shrieking match, he lobbed his favored line: “I’m going to sleep with other women.” For months, I have alternately cried, battled, negotiated, debated, and placated when slapped with that threat. But this time I replied, “Please do. I’m completely disinterested in arguing. Whatever the route you need to let me be, please take it.”
How gruesome we are. I catch myself staring at him, willing myself to feel more love than I do, to return to the ease and bliss and certainty of our first months, when I swore he was the most incredible man I’d ever met. Momma says an excellent way of getting me to do anything is to dare me. I’ll follow through and die trying.
I look at him and I dare myself, Love him, enormously and entirely, again.
This dare, I fail. I trytrytry to muster the conviction to no avail.
Daily, nightly, I ask you, How can I possibly leave, where would I possibly go, how could life apart work?
There is always a way, you reply, steely in our hard-earned confidence. There is always a way, and you will always thrive, by the simple skin of who you are.
Then you add, You can trust yourself.
Thus your words are my air as I lie on a rock hewn from my loneliness. The distance between him and me unspools like a river without an end. There is an ocean of difference between loving well and loving carelessly. Separated by this sea, he and I lie beside each other, each wishing the other was different. In my mind jeers the song “I Won’t Grow Up” from Peter Pan. His favorite. He sings it, hums it, drums its beat, whittles its lyrics into the bones of our love. Should I remain, I would be doing the same; refusing to grow. In the dark, I raise my hands, palms facing me. They shimmer with two sentiments, separate but connected. The space between them grows slimmer by the day.
I am a terrible wife. There is always a way.
IT IS COLD in the car, parked in front of the Barn. The snow persists stubbornly, surrounding the Barn in three-foot-high banks. My fingers are numb. I blow on them. I sandwich my hands between my legs. It doesn’t work. I bite the ends of my gloves and pull them off. I put my fingers in my mouth. There, warmer.
He has banished me here. I, a misbehaving pest, am not to return. Whether now or indefinitely was left unclear. Given that our cellphones don’t work here in the belly of the woods, I swiped the house phone before coming outside. At long last, I call Momma and Dad, confess what happened, what has been happening. Appalled, they urge me to leave immediately and stay with them. I can’t. I won’t.
Momma asks her three preliminary questions, asked in any conversation, and I reply with my usual half-lies.
“Are you eating enough? Sleeping enough? Do you have enough money?”
“Yes, yes, and yes, Momma.” My rationale: Enough is an opinion, highly subjective. Is the veracity of an answer determined by the ear of a receiver or the mouth of the giver? Anyway, what is the parent-child relationship but a braid of truths, well-meant lies, and omissions, all designed to preserve each other’s happiness?
“Does he hit you?” she asks, pain ripping her voice into ribbons. The sound of her hurt makes me close my eyes, and I hate myself for arriving to a place where my mother is brought to ask this. I reply with the sincere truth.
“No, Momma. He doesn’t. And if he ever tried, I promise I’d know what to do. I’d talk him down.”
“You’re so far away from any other person. Aren’t you lonely?”
“It’s all right, Momma. I’ve got the voice in my head.” I laugh lightly.
She laughs, too, a laugh dyed in sorrow. “Seriously, jaan. How are you safe? I’m scared he’ll hurt you. Is he cheating on you?”
“Maybe. But . . . really, Momma, he’s harmless. He’s just going through a lot. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you. Please don’t be scared. Or worried.” Foolish pleas made to any parent. Worry is what they do. Nevertheless, we’ll ask that they don’t.
He cracks open the Barn door, gestures that I have permission to return.
Once inside, he admits, “This has little to do with you or us. I’m not happy. And I don’t wanna change.”
Peter Pan. Dread shoots through me like desire once did. If he is unhappy and unwilling to change, we don’t have a chance.