Matrimony Housewife Days
Will she sit at home and cry out the window, hoping the smoke from the factories carries its thick familiar smell over the hill and up her alley to waft into her senses and remind her of all of the little spaces he’s still filling up in her memory? Will she subconsciously swirl her finger over the spot in the couch where his hand would be resting were he still around? Will she break down while doing the dishes, hands stuck in the soapy water and cleaning what’s left of his last night meal?
Absent from the current phase of reality, she can’t be sure what she’ll do. As of now she’s sitting, staring at a blank television, wondering if turning it on would help, knowing that it would, to just drown into some good boring nothingness, but she can’t bring herself to come fully into that thought and fall out of the half-painful, half-numbing memory of her lost, her love. Even if she could, finding the remote would be twice the burden, knowing that he would have been the one who’d lost it.
Dividing your life up into all of the pieces that define it, she thought, you can really start to see what is important, what could easily be dismissed and what amounts up to you. Surprisingly, she didn’t feel like she was any part of the equation. Cooking dinner, doing laundry, going to the gym, checking the mail – those things were part of her. He was clearly part of her, having been ripped away so quickly and without any chance of ever coming back, she knew, it was like her body had been torn in half, but worse yet, because if he was half of her, he wasn’t a cut and dry half. Not the top or the bottom, not the left or right, but rather mixed all into the different parts of her. He was a little bit of her earlobes, a little piece of her lungs, a portion of every red blood cell. And now, with his share no longer there to hold up the rest, to keep it sticky loved up together, she was aching from her teeth to her toenails.
The more she thought about it, she wasn’t actually anything, just a sum of her parts. She was a secretary, a cook, a maid, a pedestrian, a wife. Nothing more. Take away her job and she was no longer a secretary. Call the delivery guy and she was no longer a cook. She dropped a little in her skin. You couldn’t tell from the outside, but inside everything just fell a little closer to gravity. She stopped breathing.
No, she made herself to stop breathing. Determined to kill herself, not to let herself slip into unconsciousness before the lack of oxygen got the better of her brain. Black spots filled in from the sides of her eyes and then……….
The door opened.
“Hey babe!” came the voice of her husband, “I’m home from work!” She got up and met him in the kitchen for dinner and to discuss how their days had been.