Okay, we are trying something new today!

Today I am posting an excerpt from the autobiography I am forever writing.

This is what my non-blog-writing looks like. Well, the non-fiction, anyway. I’m still terrified of putting up fiction. I am pretty proud of this piece, because even now, years and years away from this moment in time, reading this makes me want to vomit. That’s a pretty evocative thing.

I wrote this during the last few months of my marriage. Obviously, not a happy time. I was constantly downing a rotten concotion of percocet, Ny-Quil, whiskey, valerian root, and enough coffee to counteract all of that completely, and then some. I was a shaky, discombobulated, walking-into-chairs wreck. This swam up during an odd moment of clear-headedness while waiting at a bus stop, and depressed me entirely: this is what I get when I’m awake? This is the True Me ™? Good lord, why haven’t I killed myself yet.

So, uh, yeah, TRIGGER WARNING x1000

In case anybody is skimming:

TRIGGER WARNING TO THE MAX

NOTHING ABOUT WHAT FOLLOWS IS HAPPY

Come

Even at my worst, there’s joy to be had in every little thing.

Last night I pressed my back against my husband’s long warm leg, curled around me in bed. As I soaked up the heat, the feel of his skin, I thought reassuringly of all the places he no longer looks at my body, the places blisters and scars could be hidden like candy. I felt disease spread through me, cold as ice water, tantalizingly sweet. The blood that could be had. A little something to look forward to in life.

And his leg, so warm and sweet, skin upon skin, in the dead of night.

Where is the evil hidden in us? It shifts, it moves, it adapts. Until the leg of the man you love, and hate, pressed against a body you pray to shed, can still feel like the good and solid thing it is. Human contact. A moment. A small joy. Like a tide, the despair recedes to reveal a glittering ocean bed.

I am living moment to moment, clutching these small wonders. I say too often I want to disappear, and maybe in that moment I do. But the end will only come when there are no small delights, no leaves to crunch on the ground, no kittens, no shared laughter at an unexpected thing. My husband says moment to moment is not enough. If he cannot see the future, he cannot enjoy the present – what if he is putting all his happiness into what later becomes a forewarning, a symbol of everything gone wrong? As if marriage were anything but. I have told him, pain never comes from the direction it’s expected. Love what you’ve got while you’ve got it.

“Look where that got you,” he scoffs.

He and I both want me to say, “Married to you.” That would be pain from the expected direction. Instead, I bite my lip and think of taking a steak knife to the soles of my feet, the back of my knees. Those were soft curved places he used to kiss till I told him how much I liked it, almost more than sex. He would never see the scars now.

He fucks me like he watches porn, never looking at my face. If the moment is not enough anyway, I wonder, why is he so angry I can’t come? Kiss me, touch me, I say. It’s better than coming. Let’s do everything we did before, when we were kids, but who cares if we get off. Who needs that part of it.

Why don’t I fuck you up the ass, he suggests. You’re not leaving me till I get every part of you.

And I think of his warm leg pressed against me, how he hates sleeping in the same bed because I press and cuddle against him in the dead of night, yet he stays because I ask him why he would want to go, leave this little warmth we have. He stays to give me mine. Little pleasures. Little joys. They’re all a man has. Who am I to say no to the things he wants, these last days.

I got lost in the city and ended up in the projects, watching two little boys play Frisbee in a parking lot. Broken bottles glittered under the sickly yellow street lamps. Neither of the boys managed to catch the Frisbee once, but, then, it wasn’t a Frisbee either, but a blue plastic plate left over from a barbecue. Still, when their respective mothers came out to haul them inside, they cried and ran, and hid the plate behind a gray little shrub, for another day.

If children can think the world of garbage, certainly I can be faithful to my wedding vows.

My husband steps out of the shower. I remember that first year in college, the large handicapped stall in the dorm showers, where we fucked each other silly after smoking a joint. I remember going back to the room and fucking till we had to shower again, not even bothering to stop when his roommate came in, making faces at each other to see who would stop feeling sexy and start laughing first.

I drop to the floor and wrap myself around his leg.

“What are you doing,” he sighs.

“I’m a koala,” I say, hugging tighter. “Koala, koala.”

“Christ. You don’t get to be cute. You’re leaving me.”

He shuts the door now, when he showers.

I have tried explaining to him that there can still be good things, even when the world is bad. He doesn’t believe me, says I must be faking it. I can’t feel anything good. I can’t feel anything. No, no, I persist, I mean, everything can be at its worst, at its most horrible, and then all of a sudden maybe you see a kitty and the kitty is cute and you can still smile and like the kitty even if the world is all shit around you. Your bad mood doesn’t make the kitty ugly.

He stares at me for a long time. He reminds me of the night I stayed away, at a friend’s house, because I began hyperventilating every time I tried to go home. “I didn’t sleep all night,” he tells me. “You kept me up. I cried. In front of my dad.” Jacob’s eyes pierce at me, asking me to bleed for this. “Just before the sun went up I took a walk outside to smoke a cigarette. I just wanted to kill. I wanted to die.” He stares at me again, wanting me to know he means me, he means I did this, he means I deserve this. I know, Jacob, I know. “And then from behind a house, there was a big mama kitty, and she was leading a lot of little baby kittens. They were playing in the lawn and just the most adorable thing ever.” I nod and smile, about to say, see, you see what I mean, things can still be beautiful, why can’t we enjoy the good we have, when he continues, “So I kicked them across the lawn.”

When we were kids he used to come to my window in the middle of the night, telling me what he’d done with his day, and how it made him think of loving me.

“We can do that again,” I whisper to him in bed, as he pulls away and I search for his leg, his back, this body I have loved for seven years. “When I move out, we can visit each other, surprise-like. We can enjoy the time we have, instead of searching for a way to fill it. Have something that holds us together, not just being in the same room.”

“I don’t work that way,” he says. “I can’t do it. This is going to kill me. But the worst part is—“ and he pulls away, taking the covers with him, “I don’t care. I’m gonna let you make a pussy out of me.” He pauses, sniffs. “At least there’s one pussy in this bed willing to get fucked.”

I stare at the moon out the window. He is thinking of porn when he fucks me; I think of the cold, the outside, every time I speak to him. We’re pretty much the same, these days. “Will you feel better if you can fuck me right now,” I sigh.

He used to say no. There was a time he would say no to an offer that flat. There was a time he wouldn’t be able to get it up for me, lying there and staring out the window. Now he says yes, and I wait for him to finish.

“I’m going to miss this,” he says afterwards, peeling off the condom.

“I’m sorry.” I am.

We stopped for a while, because it hurt. We couldn’t figure out how to stop it hurting. The wedding vows say, in sickness and in health. So I just don’t tell him anymore. He gets his little joy, and so do I.

The sick opens within me, like a flower. I sink into the pain. Later, I bleed. I took a vow and it ought to hurt. If promises felt good, everyone would keep them.

The night we watched the couples sex tape, I got drunk to keep from crying.

“When I first saw her naked,” one man says, “it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I felt like… like I could come right there, just looking at her.” His wife giggles and turns shyly away from the camera. He grabs her face and turns it to him. “You know, honey, I still feel that way.”

“Look at that hat,” my husband sneers, reading a D&D book at the foot of the couch. “Fuckin’ cowboy. He would marry a woman like that.” He goes out for a cigarette, comes back five minutes later. I am half the bottle drunker.

“Do you see anything you like,” I hear myself asking, face buried in the couch so he cannot see me choking back sobs. “Anything you want to do.”

“No.” A door clicks, the computer turns on. “Tell me when it’s over,” he shouts into the living room.

The rest of the bottle drunker. “It’s over.”

It’s over it’s over it’s over.

“You wanna slow down on that whiskey, hon?”

It’s over it’s over it’s over.

“We should probably have sex.”

“Tell me when it’s over.”

“I just don’t have many kinks.” We are lying on opposite sides of the bed, naked. He reaches over and pokes at my nipple, tickles my hip, all the places I have told him I hate to be touched. I make a game of forcing myself to stay still, swallow the urge to ask him, for the hundredth time, to stop that. To keep my face cold and flat as the moon out the window.

I give him my I-majored-in-Psychology voice. “It’s not about kinks. It’s about rediscovering your partner and a sense of fun and adventure.”

“I have fun.” I’m bone dry, but he starts in anyway. “So do you.”

“Maybe we could have more.” My voice is flat as a tape recorder.

“I’m just not interested.”

I imagine my heart is a cinder block. It pumps gravel through my veins, weighing me down to the bed. I’m not human. I don’t feel things like real humans. I don’t feel this. Now, suddenly, I start getting wet.

“I guess there’s one thing I’d like to try…” He has gone back to poking my nipple. I sigh wearily and turn on my side. His hands follow me, forcing themselves under my arms as I cross them against my chest.

“What.”

“Well… you know, my earliest fantasies were rape fantasies.”

Pressure descends through the room. The air is thick and heavy and if he wasn’t my husband, I would listen to my body as it screams, “Get out get out get out.” Instead I listen to the pumping of the cinder block.

Because he is my husband. Sickness and health. We must take what we can get, the small joys, even in sickness.

With shrink voice, to cover the dread, I ask, “Do you mean non-consent fantasies, the no please don’t but oh my god yes, or…”

“Both.”

I sniff. “All right.”

“Well… we watched the video.”

“Uh huh.”

“We should probably have sex.”

“Yes,” I say, drunker than I thought, not as drunk as I want to be. “The video says that’s what couples should do. We’re a couple, right? Yes. I guess that’s what we ought to do. Yes.”

“Want to take it easy on that whiskey, hon?”

“Let’s do it from behind.”

“Doesn’t that usually hurt you?”

“Yes.” He will take his small joy, and I will take mine.

“Are you gonna be okay with that?”

“Whatever.”

You are my knife, I think, during. You are my knife and I love you.

I bleed.

That time. The next time, and the next.

“I’ll make it quick,” is our pillowtalk.

Little joys. He gets his, and so do I.

The first year is the hardest, they say. And marriage takes work, of course.

If I just bleed enough, I think, next year there will be calluses. You take pleasure in what you can. You find love in scars, which are the fingers of your lover across your skin, the warmth of their body pressed against you. One finds joy in the cinder block that pounds away inside you, scraping your insides clean. And marriage takes work, never-ending. If you work hard enough, I tell myself, the joy will come. It has to. Nothing else on you does.