Coming to know, a decision being made, is not conscious. 1 + 1 + 1 equals a new feeling that rubs against everything else you know to be true. An idea this unruly sits deep in the body, whispering what it knows. This isn’t right, it starts. Nothing is perfect, I beg. But by answering after lifelong ignorance the thing and I marry so suddenly, as I’ve done before, becoming more connected to each other than I am to whom I am legally beholden. We, the thing and I, are in constant conversation, weighing the dissonance inside when we breathe. It speaks up and I talk it down.
The thing tells me that ‘nice’ is not a quality worth having. Sure, for others, it’s a steal. For the self, it’s robbery. Niceness is an optic, an offer, a trade. A false negotiation where the nice one always folds. Giving oneself up is the expectation of niceness. Nice means to be agreeable. Now kindness, that’s different. Rooted in compassion and generosity, it does not require the same self-sacrifice. You see, to be nice and agreeable, you must be compliant.
Compliant, or, “inclined to agree with others or obey rules, especially to an excessive degree”. To an excessive degree! Another word for compliant is acquiescent, which carries inside another clue, meaning “the readiness to accept something without protest, or to do what someone else wants”. Readiness. To be ready is to be “fully prepared”. To be at the ready is to “be fully prepared and available for immediate use”.
Use. Use. Use. Do you see now?
To accept something without protest. Protest, “a statement or action expressing disapproval of or objection to something”. See also, complaint. The thing and I argue over compliant and complaint. A linguistic and spiritual debate, and ironically and predictably, I find that I agree with the thing demanding I trade my constant compliance for loud complaint.
But what of goodness, I plead. We want to be good for others, for mothers and fathers, for friends and lovers, for neighbors and strangers, for our own memory. Your goodness is self-serving garbage. Good, “to be desired or approved of”. The thing has semantics on its side. Good, “that which is morally right”. See also, righteousness, virtue. Virtue. Uh oh. I’m cornered now.
Virtue, “high moral standard. Or, virginity or chastity, especially of women.”
Especially of Women.
Especially of Women.
Especially of Women.
Especially of Women.
Especially of Women.
There it is. The pit of the thing. And it starts the culling.
The thing, the prosecution, has been quietly accumulating evidence.
Remember when she left you standing in Miami, eating money and yourself alive. Yes and her long legs and blonde hair blooming in the teal water of the Keys. She threw her head back and cackled over the wind as the boat took us back to the sinking archipelago, shoulder to shoulder to keep our salty wet bodies warm. We knew it was ending then, again. Like when we reached San Francisco years before and ran out of land to cross. Remember your arm around her waist that night on the Santa Monica Pier, holding on to each other so tight. I gave her what she wanted but she knew I was lying.
Remember when your dad was dying and your family was falling apart and you were losing your home, she requested that you host her wedding where you were not allowed to have your own, where you were no longer welcome, that you perform the ceremony, take the pictures, make the dinner, abandon yourself while you were cracking up and open, unable to stand on the very earth on which you were born with the person who made you, disappeared? It fell apart then.
Remember when he died, she never called? Yes, and there was no more after that.
Remember when he imprisoned you in your past self, a nice and scared girl who he bent into submission with his language and lips in dark hallways and corners of house parties? His breath on your neck, hands pressing the small of your back, yours pulling his hair, never in the light. He came back 20 years later to get a hand job over the phone, daring you to disrupt the fantasy of the past with the knowing of the present.
Remember when you searched for his ethics, demanded honesty, and he said you were too challenging, too smart to be with. Less brains, more knockout, he said. This is what I want to do to you, possess you, hear you gasp. Just because he never did. You’ll always write about me. He married her 6 months later.
Remember when he circled you in the bookstore, like predator and prey was an old childhood game? And two months later, when he called you drunk from a hotel in Kentucky, where you once, twice, three times stayed together, and he demanded you validate his sins and turn him on, a forced baptism at your own expense. It could have been us and in the same breath suggesting he got married because of you? Because he knew for certain it would be easier with her. Did you want him or did you want to be desired? Were you simply resurrecting your own desire from the dead? The answer made you block his number.
Remember when your ex from over 20 years ago slid into your DMs and demanded you laugh at sexist memes you told him to stop sending you? Dumb TikToks of husbands impersonating their wives, wearing horrible wigs, nagging them in high-pitched falsetto, unable to admit fault, being quite unreasonable. Ex-boyfriends and almost lovers should not be allowed to contact you through the digital proximity of social media and cellular devices. It is a closeness I do not consent to. I am not a television channel to be turned on. More past imprisonment, he demands you be 19, willing to go down on him in his Bronco even though he doesn’t know how to reciprocate or locate the anatomy that would create such a strong reaction. Locked in suspension, don’t burst the bubble of imagination and memory. Where’s the joke, you demand. If I’d known you’d get so offended I wouldn’t have sent it. I’m not offended, you are offending. You read too much into these things. No. You’re an intellectual now. My brain, a constant obstacle.
Remember when he campaigned against you and your hometown believed the self-projections he stuck on you and you were too nice and scared to open your mouth and tell the truth about what he did to you? Him, counting on your nice silence, and you, always seeing the best in monsters. Even now you say close to nothing.
Remember when a man who shares half your DNA made it clear you were not the firstborn son and waged a war against you, whispering into your dying father's ear while his mind was traveling outside of time and space? It was the beginning of the end. And you made room for him. On your knees, holding the decisions made before you were born inside your body, repenting for actions you now know were necessary and brave and acts of love and desire and not child abandonment and shame?
Remember how he took your life from you and from others before and after and no one could hear the screaming? And after your father died when the locals came to bend the knee, worried they’d be stuck with the oldest son and heir, you were elbow deep in a turkey that you snuck out into the field and shot, feathers and blood up your arms, and all you could do was shrug, choke, and tell them you’d be back to fight for what’s yours someday. When I’m stronger. Someday.
Remember when you held your father as he died while your mother fussed with his eyelids? She moved the trash can around the room, worried at feet that had been useless for months. It’s exhausting being around alive people who have left their bodies. I much prefer the leaving dead, for their absence is beautiful and ever-present.
Should I go on? The thing knows more than I do. Remembers more clearly. Its rage is undeniable and urgent. We have given too much. We are empty. We’ll have to look at it eventually. We’ve known for years. Turning away costs us more precious time. Is this living? Are you going to roll over and play dead? Again?
No. Let’s start. Again.
I tried to stay. I was a good wife. I tried to be good. Staying is good. I was nice and understanding. I’m nothing if not overly sympathetic to the man who chose me. He is nice. I am nice. A stalemate. I gave him fourteen nice years. A good wife, a good daughter, a good person. It’s undeniable. It’s righteous. It’s safe.
I tried to stay true. I ended my cheating ways. Cheating for me is a result of being too nice to leave someone who doesn’t want me to go or give me up or lose control. Cheat, or, avoid, escape, evade, elude, dodge, duck, miss, sidestep, bypass, skirt, shun, eschew, foil, frustrate, thwart, balk, defeat. Escape. Just once, blind drunk and lonely on a hotel balcony, I kissed someone, him, of hands pressing the small of my back, pulling his hair, handjob over the phone. It was a moment of isolation and sadness. I was vulnerable. I called home sobbing in shame, body on fire. I bottled up my desire then and pitched it into the ocean. The stakes felt high for goodness. Was this a proportional response? It was just a kiss. It didn’t matter, untrustworthy, I gave up my body for good. I never strayed again. He had no feelings about it one way or the other. Over the years I brought my shame to his continued indifference.
I bought the house. Made us a home. I mowed the lawn. Cleaned the floors and the gutters. Planted lilacs, two species so we’d have a longer bloom season, staked peonies, split hosta, pruned roses, my tiny hands catching on the thorns, bloody in my gloves. I thrifted and searched, painstakingly adorning our house like a set piece for a live taping of prime time good marriage. The invisible emotional labor I didn’t have words for then buried me. Family obligations, meal planning, week planning, life planning, five years, ten years, what should we do? What’s for dinner? He had no opinions. I carried it alone. When the depression settled in and the cooking, cleaning, yard work, the laundry began to pile up next to a dirty litter box, who held the responsibility? I slept for years to the lulling sound of my shame.
I dried out. I looked in the mirror, two black eyes stared back at me, dried blood in my hair, and thought my drinking was ruining his life. In my constant belligerence and hangovers, erratic behavior, I was killing him, his future. I fell down stairs, ate the cement, bit my tongue, swelled my brain, collecting scars that mark my present body. Booze and drugs and cigarettes would never fill the lack. I wouldn’t do what my family did, ignore it. Shrug and say boys will be boys. Again and again, I must learn I’m not a son. If he noticed me dying he said nothing. I spent years in the woods and water alone white-knuckling a newly sober brain and body. Standing chest-deep in dark pools of water in the middle of the night knowing that if I knelt down and let my waders fill with cold water and drown me they would assume it was an accident. I lost my footing while night fishing. It’s a tragedy. Drowning is a lot like drinking, it starts with an innocent gulp and ends in death. I laid awake in remote Michigan campgrounds on the Black, the Holy Waters, listening to Superior, on the Yellow Dog, in the dunes, in the white pines, tucked into my beloved Mason Track, casting, running, following the two tracks, going blow for blow with myself, dipping my broken body into the icy watersheds of my home. The thing wasn’t awake then. I was fueled by the shame and fear I endured alone, eating me up, cosmically disconnected from any other living human. This runaway feeling and distance, my husband refused to acknowledge.
I got help. With various SSRIs and the four walls of a therapist's office, I lost my mind reaching for what was unbearable. I came back to my body after a lifetime of dissociation and I knew why I’d almost drank myself to death. Too much had happened and it was rattling around inside me without words. There was a violence, a plea for peace in death or wellness, that I could no longer ignore. I sat in it. Twice a week, I soaked. I dug and named and died and narrated. After a few years, it was worse. Feeling it, at first, it's worse. It cannot get better until you disinfect the wound completely. You cannot leave a trace. Until it’s clean, it’s infected. I sat with the backlog of emotions and felt it all. He zoned out and listened but he did not speak. I reached for him and he turned away. He could not comfort.
He could not care. Care, “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something, feel concern or interest; attach importance to something, look after and provide for the needs of”.
He could not feel. Feel, “be aware of (a person or object) through touching or being touched, experience (an emotion or sensation)”.
We stopped touching. Emotionally, physically, in any of the ways humans can and must. Sober intimacy was terrifying, bringing to light all of my ancient insecurities I could not conquer, and the lack of emotional connection left me dead in the water, my desire sunken years before, miles of desert ahead of me.
I began to leave. I ran away from my family to Los Angeles. I never wanted to leave my home, but it had left and rejected me first. I had no choice and was frantically trying to avoid fate and grab hold of a destiny, something I could determine. I made the decision alone and he followed. My teaching jobs practically volunteer work, his corporate job supported me. A trap disguised as support. I’d lost my financial independence and he controlled our finances. I knew better but I was a good wife.
I held an estate sale and sold most of our belongings and our home of over a decade emptied. I threw the dog and cat in the car and headed west. I’d marked these roads clearly, lined with sugar maples and old white pines, no trespassing signs now nailed to their trunks. I wanted to see him put the leaves back on the trees, but he didn’t seem to notice they'd fallen. As we drove the signs were clear, last chance for gas, turn back now. Crossing the Mississippi, leaving the Midwest for the prairie, then the desert, it was torture, sagebrush and sunsets screaming in my eyes. How heavy this load, the weight of relationships lost. We lived in a hotel for two weeks while we looked for an apartment that cost more than I could fathom. More strings. Once we found it, I made myself a home. He was also there. I warned him, I am leaving.
My father began to die. Grief permeated every cell of my body. I’d left Michigan for my own welfare, holding onto the last shreds of my sanity, and now the person I loved most in my life was dying in the one place I could not go. I thought I had more time, five years at least, to get right with my life and stage an epic and bloody return. The Alzheimers took his mind and left his body. Relatable. He died a year and a half after his diagnosis, holding my hand as he finally left his body behind. These were the hardest years of my life, these are the moments that haunt me. I was sure all my work led me to the moment of being present with myself and my father, honoring his life as he lived his last days, singing to him, him holding my face, urgently whispering I love you, I love you. Words I still hear when I close my eyes.
My husband wasn’t there. I suffered through the grief and loss in isolation with someone snoring next to me. A stranger I’ve slept next to for fourteen years. I told my friends I’m leaving. One thing at a time or you’ll die, they say. Didn’t I die? How many times does a woman have to die for someone else?
Let’s start again.
I tried to stay. I wanted to be good. I wanted to win the prize of good wife, good friend, good girlfriend, good ex, good daughter. There is no such winning. There is only independence traded for the mirage of safety. There is only niceness as transaction, goodness as virtue, a particularly feminine problem. My body is a fire that he puts out with neglect. I gave grace and time when I was given nothing. I have lived alone in my life next to the walking dead, with those who are absent in life.
But I am no longer alone. I have the thing.
The thing fills me up and I am wedded to its rage. It is intoxicating. It fills my body and pushes me forward. Two halves finally in whole, separated for 40 years, standing as one and furious. The thing and I keep it all for ourselves now. Taking up space and living together in secret conversation and questioning, in acts of desire and indulgence. It is the thing and I, forever. Total devotion. Religious dedication. I stand in service to it in totality.
I talk back. I make enemies. I end relationships. I tell the truth. I stay with myself. You want to leave me? Leave. You’re worried they will abandon you? They already have. It is a constant culling and we must be vigilant. Only I determine what is good. Only I can do what I need. Goodness and womanhood co-exist only in violence. I don’t want to be good. I want to be real. What is safety in a patriarchal system like marriage but a promise of present and future control? I’d trade knowing the future for orgasms I give myself in my own apartment, not knowing when or who my next companion will be. I don’t know where I will go, where I will live, who I will be with, who I will become. And in this knowing of unknowing, I do the one thing I’ve been working towards. I let it all go. I leave.