If you are true, a reality and not a dream, I’m not sure I can forgive myself for how I love you.
We exist in vastly different worlds within the same walls. Yours, a place family can be counted on, where two vacations a year are average, and luxury cars are an everyday fact.
Mine, a place where no one lends you a golf club, where two or three jobs are more commonplace than vacations, where you’re lucky to own anything new.
Our parallel worlds have collided in marriage. A union. A trap.
A body sweating next to me in the night. Sticking to the one thousand count thread sheets, sticking to me like bad breath.
I haven’t told you yet, but I’m leaving. Maybe not now, but in a year, or five. It is as inevitable as the argument we had this morning.
You said I wasn’t putting the same effort into the relationship that you were. I said there aren’t gifts or vacations to buy for you, who has and has always had everything. Everything I do for you is small or unoriginal. You say it’s the point that counts. I say I’m doing my best.
You left, in the Tom Ford sunglasses, blue golf button up, YSL cologne following you out the door. You see life as an extravagant dinner to stuff yourself as gluttonously as possible with. Why won’t your wife be eaten gracefully? My stomach is new to digesting this table of delicacies you grew up gorging on. I bite back the bile and tongue threatening to show themselves at family dinners. I must be thankful for the seat saved for me. I must be thankful you saved me. You could have chosen any poor girl.
I sit on the back stoop and pulled out my secret stash of cigarettes. You say they’re trashy and stink. I revel in it today.
We weren’t always so eager to hate each other, if you can call it hate when you shit and eat in the same places day after day together. Once, it was more than I could hope for to make it through each day without a new violence unfolding itself into my lap.
You’ve heard, in bits and pieces, about my childhood. You haven’t felt a man scream so close to your face you can smell him, feel spit. You haven’t helped your mother pack a life in a day. You haven’t felt the soul ache to leave in any way possible.
You are pure, with only the life given to you to look after. I am dirty, with bruises blossoming across all the places in my brain that produce happiness.
I tried therapy. Five times. Four women, one man. I tried Prozac, Zoloft, yoga, sea breeze, love.
You say I have to realize that there is a life beyond the past. I try to tell you that I am chronically haunted, but it never comes out right. You see excuses while I see flashbacks. When I look at you too hard, I see someone I don’t know.
I have done what I consider to be my best at being a human who fits into your shiny world. I’ve shopped at stuffy brands to impress your mother. A month’s rent spent on flats only acceptable for brunch. I’ve asked your dad politely about how his retirement is going, how his goddamn pickleball team is. Your brother thinks I’m a bitch. I can’t blame him. No matter how bright my smile, I exist outside of myself around your family. I am grateful, I promise. They’ve taken me in as best they know, with tense hugs, tiptoeing around my past.
I hate it, but I miss my own family sometimes. If not the turmoil, the comfortability of knowing where I stand, even if it is in the place of disappointment. My mother never meant to have me. She told me every time she was drunk. And when she wasn’t. I was the result of a stupid twenty-two-year-old night she’ll always regret, and I have sucked her life away. Made her fat, made her poor.
I stub the butt of my cigarette out and stare blankly at the trimmed row of bushes bordering our backyard. Michigan is chilly in October. I go inside and pull out the yellow carryon your mother bought us as a wedding present. I’ve always hated yellow. I pack the cheapest clothes I have from our time together. I leave the cigarettes on our bed beside the emerald cut diamond.
I step into the garage, consider turning the car on, leaving the door closed, waiting for the fumes to take me. I decide that driving away will feel better than dying. I don’t want your family to dress me in some god awful stiff yellow dress for a funeral.
Call me depressive, call me pathetic. All I know of myself is that I cannot stand to exist in your world a second longer. I get in the car, no note left on the counter, and back out.
On highway 101, I consider what it would look like to drive off the edge all the way to Washington.
I am twenty-six. I am free.
I stub the butt of my cigarette out and stare blankly at the too trimmed row of bushes bordering our backyard. Michigan is chilly in October. I go inside. I’m thinking of making pasta tonight, or something from one of the fancy cookbooks your mother has gifted us. I’m thinking of offering my body as a peace offering when you come home, half-drunk from the Weller your friend is surely slipping into you. I’ll put on one of the red lace things that makes you think you’re still in love with me, and makes me feel like I only exist under your gaze.
The choice to stay hangs heavy in my hair. I haven’t told you yet, but I’m leaving.
Photo by Matthew Grous on Unsplash
