We join our hero sitting on his good-but-not-great couch in the late morning hours, deep in thought with last year’s comforter pooled at his feet. He doesn’t know that he needs to make these moments count; seconds from now he will be incapable of any rational thought. When cognitive ability returns, he won’t be the same man, making these the last thoughts this man will ever have. Mere feet from him, through two thin walls of his good-but-not-great apartment, in the bedroom there is something waiting for him which will change his life forever. It’s something that he isn’t yet aware has become a “something.” To him, it (again, not yet an “it” to him) is still someone. And not just someone, but the only one who really matters, the only person who makes anything else matter. In short, she’s everything. But right now, he’s squandering his last few thoughts on the idea of divorcing her – an idea which he shared with her two days ago – and on running through the events of the last two days in his mind.
Two days ago was Christmas, mostly known around their apartment as the day after their wedding anniversary. A day which they had celebrated, as they had every other time they’d been lucky enough to enjoy it alone together, with dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. An outside observer might have concluded that the fight started there at that restaurant, but he and his wife knew that this fight had been going on for years. The subject of the fight had changed many times over the 12 years they’d been together, but it was only ever really about one thing: neither of them believed they deserved or were good for each other. The intense and overwhelming love that they have for one another, the complete and utter devotion, didn’t change those beliefs. The man our hero will become, after he discovers that his one true someone has become a something, will be able to tell you this belief was, for him, rooted in both the fact that he hated himself and that he’d devoted his life to turning his love of her into a substitute for her love of herself. Whether he understood the reasons why at the time, he determinedly resolved to leave her in order to save her from his attempts to save her. She would be better off without his toxic codependent love. This is what he told this woman who was still a someone on the Christmas night after their 6th wedding anniversary.
Our hero spent that night on the couch with last year’s comforter. The next day very little was said in that apartment, not that he would have been able to recall most of it for use in these last moments of thought. He’d always had a bad memory when it came to interpersonal interactions, possibly because he spent most of them deeply entrenched in his own mind, engineering the conversation instead of participating in it. Perhaps the years-long fight wasn’t only about whether they were good for each other, but also about his cold detachment and inability – or flat-out unwillingness – to connect with her on an emotional level. They are two very emotional people who came up in emotionally trying environments and responded to their situations in completely different ways. She became sensitive and impulsive, wearing her heart on her sleeve and endlessly trying to make sense of the pain that resulted by blaming herself. He became calloused and controlled, never showing his heart to anyone and slowly drowning in the thick, dark depths he cowered in, pointing to the resulting self-inflicted isolation as proof that he didn’t belong. He respected her so much for her choices, for there was courage and defiance and strength in the face of pain. To her and to those who didn’t know them or care to, he was the strong one and she the weak. He knew the truth, however. He was hiding and she was bare. With her pain came growth and change while he stayed frozen in his isolated, cowering state, content to go on forever in this way because it worked. Nobody could touch him. Not even this woman with whom he’d spent over a decade, who loved and respected him, who would never judge and would always forgive and love and accept. Still he cowered. When she reached out to him and begged him to extend his hand in return, he flinched back and told her she had no right to ask him for that.
No, he didn’t know all of this two days ago, not as clearly as the man he will become will know it, but he felt a lot of it and understood that he wasn’t good for her. So the next day, after he’d spent his first night with last year’s comforter, they talked again after most of a day spent in silence. There was crying, mostly by her as he retreated to the comforting prison within himself which limited the ability of even these most painful moments to affect the landscape of his face in any way he didn’t care to allow. As skillful and measured as a deadly predator with it’s prey in reach, he metered out just enough emotion to sustain the necessarily emotional conversation. At one point, our hero actually told her that he was worried about what she’d do without him and whether she could take care of herself. Cold nights lay ahead for the man he will become during which he will try to figure out what purpose that statement was meant to serve.
With the screaming, crying, and detached misunderstanding of unstated feelings done for the day, she retreated to the bedroom and he stayed on the other side of the two thin walls. He wouldn’t have been able to tell you, either at that moment or at any point in the future, what his thoughts were as he sat there. Eventually he decided to go to the gym, precipitating a timely trip into the bedroom to retrieve his headphones. The door was locked and she took a noticeable amount of time to open the door for him. As he was getting the all-important device which serves to simultaneously shut out the world and visibly inform them of it, he noticed movement in the mirror on the other side of the room. It looked like she was reaching under the bed. Mechanically, being careful and controlled due to the emotionally tense atmosphere, our hero turned to his wife and asked her what she was doing.
Our hero’s wife slowly pulled out a bottle of scotch from under the bed. This woman, still very much a someone, had been fired nearly a year ago for drinking in the parking lot of her job, an event which came as a shock to her oblivious husband who’d had no idea that she’d been sliding into alcoholism for quite some time. Since then she’d gone to rehab and was regularly attending 12-step meetings. She was currently just days short of her seventh month of sobriety; they didn’t give out chips for that one, only the ninth month mattered between 6 and 12. The scotch was Johnny Walker Blue Label, a bottle which had been gifted to our hero some 5 or 6 years ago by a friend and which had his name engraved into the glass. It was the only bottle of alcohol, nestled into the top shelf of a closet, unopened and in a leather case, which had survived the inevitable Pouring into the Sink with which all loved ones of alcoholics are familiar. Our hero looked at the bottle and finally began to really notice the strained look on her face, the spiral notebook and pen on the bed, the single blister pack of DayQuil capsules.
He stared into the beautifully expressive eyes he’d regarded so often over the last 12 years. His chivalrous words are the last she’ll ever hear him utter: “Should I be worried?” The second to last phrase he’ll ever hear from her mouth was simple and he didn’t know how to respond: “I just want to get fucked up.” Given the circumstances, he didn’t feel he had the right to lecture or interfere. The very last words that ever pass between our hero and his wife are sarcastically screamed after him through bitter tears as he marches out of the bedroom, out of the apartment and out of the most meaningful and rewarding relationship he’ll ever have: “Have fun at the gym!”
Back from the gym two hours later, the apartment was as dark and quiet as its residents. The bedroom door was locked and our hero used the nail file on a set of fingernail clippers to get it open. He stood there in the doorway, feeling helplessly afraid, either unaware of why or unable to admit it to himself, looking at the familiar form of his wife. She was curled up in the fetal position, on top of the covers, the bottle of scotch on the bedside table with what looked like four or five ounces missing. She’s sleeping, right? The thought now turned into a question by the man our hero will become, the same man who will want to know why our hero didn’t walk through the doorway to check on her more thoroughly, try to wake her up, see what kind of state she was in. At this time that man didn’t exist, though, so instead our hero closed the door, grabbed last year’s comforter from the guest bedroom where he’d gotten it the night before, and headed to the couch.
He stayed up very late that night. The man he becomes the morning after will often wonder: for how many of those hours spent awake on the couch did he share the apartment with his living wife? During how many of those hours was she still a someone? How many episodes of those inane, barely noticed TV shows? How long into that night would she still have been capable of being saved had there been someone in the apartment willing to act like they gave a shit? Did she lay there dying as our hero – and hers – masturbated to internet porn two thin walls and one carelessly closed door away? Or had she already become a something by then? These questions as yet unthought-of, he slept like a baby on their – at some point in the night as he slept, it became his – couch and awoke in the late morning hours.
And now he sits in the living room, the apartment far too quiet, bright daylight streaming through the blinds of the sliding-glass door. He’s wasting his last few moments of comprehension and cognition on thoughts of how he should give her space. They’re fighting, after all. In his opinion – the last one this man will ever be able to have on the subject – it’s one of the worst fights they’ve ever had. Sure, there have been worse… like the time she walked out on him and got a hotel room while they were on vacation with his family. He’d had to wake up his sister, crying, to ask her for the car keys so he could drive his wife to some cheap hotel where she would arrange some other means of getting home while he cried with his family and defended his wife to them. That fight was definitely worse, thinks our hero; the man he will soon become is not yet able to disagree. But still, this one is pretty bad and it certainly wouldn’t help matters to crowd her. Yet, after an hour or so spent sitting on the couch in the too-bright living room, the silence becomes unavoidable and he must go to the door he’d unlocked the night before.
Our hero knocks a few times and calls to the someone that is no longer there. There is no answer. The feeling he’d first felt the night before while standing at the same door is settling back into his stomach, still either not recognized or not confessed. He knocks harder and calls louder; the silence is now deafening, urgently demanding an explanation for itself. An explanation which can only be found on the other side of the formerly locked door. As he opens the door, it should be instantly apparent that the something lying on the bed is no longer the someone whom he’d spent so many years trying to love correctly. However, this is the exact moment at which our hero loses all capacity for rational thought, so nothing is apparent to him. The someone that had been lying in the fetal position the night before is now something stiffly stretched the full length of the bed. Her (it’s) arms are bent at the elbows, as tightly contracted as possible, with the wrists turned inward and curling so that the clenched fists are touching her (it’s) shoulders. Her (it’s) head is craned back so that tortured red eyes regard the wall against which the head of the bed sits, the mouth pulled into a tight yet impossibly wide and painful-looking grimace that looks too much like a grin.
The man who is no longer our hero crosses from the doorway to the bed, reaching out with a hand that first lands on what used to be the leg of his wife. The hem of her sweatpants has pulled up and he’s touching the bluish flesh of her lower shin. It’s cold and stiff and alien and somehow impossibly there. As he stares at her contorted face, uttering what could be questions or pleas or just lamenting negations, his hands unconsciously work their way up what was her body, feeling for signs of the someone who should be here, touching her in a way that bears no resemblance to the way he’s touched her countless times in the past. They find no such signs. Everything falls away. There is no thought, there is no time, there is nothing. By the time he’s touching her face, a face which had once held everything in it but is now terrifyingly empty, he’s making an unrecognizable sound that could be called a moan. It might have started in what was once his brain as the word “no.” He tears his hands away from this something that cannot be his someone and falls down, down, falling forever, story after story from an impossible height, reaching terminal velocity, until he crashes into the wall two feet from the edge of the bed where he had been standing. Reeling from the impact, he crawls along the wall, desperately moving toward the doorway, still making the sound that could be called a moan and which might have started as the word “no.” Some interminable time later, he gains some semblance of consciousness to find that he’s on the floor in the living room, on his hands and knees, hovering over his cell phone as it sits on the carpet with the number 911 on the screen. He’s trying to turn sobs and moaning into words, trying to get the sound coming from the device on the floor to understand that someone has to come, someone has to come deal with something.