The Wife

Pack it up, pack it in, in and let me begin. I cannot let this float float away like the floater afloat on a wide sargasso sea. I must stab, I must knife. Slash and fall. Sometimes, my mind’s hue is of cyanide affliction. mustard gas ochre. I don't want to say I don't know, I don't know why, why, questioning why, where, how. It coops me in with its deviant mother hen that starves her chicks. It allows me to be with it; I must stab; this reverberation and hellish mirror acutely defined. Every sentence starting with my interrogative. as if a helpless woman child. My reality will not be quashed. squashed to a pulp, smashed across my head. 

It is excruciating. crucifying to watch other women. as if I brim full of envy, jealousy’s oil drum. but I’m not. of their apparent free-ness and lack of false rumination. I am not the jealous type. how have I come to be, so questioning. I don't want to say anything about it because I know I know it is false. But feeding it with words is the only way to stab it. out damned spot damned falsehood.

___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Like I feel and see a memory that is not mine, but his. but it isn’t. sahara mirage. I think he is thinking of her in the house. walking up the stairs, splayed across the bed. Wishing for me to be. Wishing. to be..? to be a woman like this. a woman like that. oh, fetch the bolt cutters. that is what I want to do. A part of my brain is fetid and dead, poisons my head and stigmatises my heart. a gnarled tooth scrapes flesh from my frontal cortex. Self flagellation of the sinews. of the intestines. the veins that stick out of my hand because of an inflammation. the inflammation of a useless poisonous shit sack. it left me to rot. to fester alone which is fine, fine to be alone some times, at times.

 I do feel love. its not that I don’t feel love or not know that I am loved. wonder wondering. paranoia’s cage. am I being vulnerable? should I say something loving? and again? again, but like someone else. someone light. I am light. ask whether he thinks I am beautiful? whether he loves me? he does. I speculate but do not say for fear of appearing some way, unpreferrable, unnecessary. vulnera. vulnera is a wound. wounded animal. I am not a wolf lying on the side of a hill wanting to merge with the moss like blood pervading milk. I am effervescent. like the wind. Kierkegaard, to love is to learn to live existing within its potential anxieties’. a master of the unknowns. what are you thinking? do you want to run away to a life unknown, to women unknown? I believed it would be a relief to him if things were ended. to feel a burden an onus. like an anus firing shit. I see other women and think he would be happier with them, that kind of woman. I see them making love. their soft skin and perfumed bodies. mums meeting dads meeting fun brothers and cool sisters. museum goers, theatre frequenters. book exchangers and provencal holidays. open hearts and great clothes. stabbing. medieval torture weapons stab through my poisoned abdomen. three pronged stag antlers pierce my body with force with speed. like a g6. three incisions make three crescent moons. the sun shines out of their tanned faces. creative outlets, french living, tres chic. I try to pinpoint this hell but it aligns me with the holes. the fake news. am I an autistic narcissist? a weird wife. a weirdo. should I present more happy, more gleeful, more feminine. I have that triangle. Should I be more maternal towards dogs. more giddy but not childlike. throw smiles.

Soft I am but on the off, aloof and exoskeletal. the far away beetle. Should I want sex less. Should I talk more, should I think less and talk talk chat converse chat more and more. Should I ask for more worded expression of love. immature! woman child. otter. owl. ta wit ta woo who are you. Bernadine Everisto. more Zadie Smith less Rupi Kaur. I’m not either of these women. I want to perform. I have great compassion, great bravery, destiny’s child. Its not a want. I don’t have the words. thinking smothers sometimes. at times, in between everything. I say ‘I think so’ and ‘maybe’. a middle roader. but I’m not. I think I think too compartmentalised sometimes. prosaic patterns. fix up, I looked blunt. not all of the time. a reverberation. why do I feel this way? the boy lying in the bed cradling the pillow telling the night, telling me he misses her. if you did read the letters it was from a long time ago and I’ve kept them for memories, he said. I didn’t read them, I didn’t know they were there. the devil’s mambo number 5 abuses each orifice. you’re better than her, his parting words. a stolen obituary.

is this how people are? is this what locality is what having a family is. I am from where, not here. from everywhere and nowhere. you feel ok you feel like you know where you are, what is likely to happen for the next year the next hour. odds at 2 to 1. your feet plant ground bound and no one makes you run for a life. days remain unnumbered, you can relax. things retain nuance. things. those you can have too. you can stay and etch yourself into a hill, the privacy of a lane. you can stay. you have the luxury of relaxation, to settle, there is no impending upending. conversations can be small and light and still genuine. I don’t know how to converse lightly because I’m too well versed in the heavy verses, the ballad. total eclipse of the heart. rugs remain fastened. Something to give back, some place to share with him, somewhere I know as well as he does, he has shared and showed me so much, I have no location to give back no warm cave. there’s no loose stitching no cowboys. no running away no hiding. no lying. you can stay. lets build a life. no superficiality no second guess swing, no American smooth. no throwing lamps. what have I seen of as love? what have I seen as a life? a tribute act perhaps. that goes wrong at each page turn. their lonely island. quite sad quite troubled. quite? shouldn’t I say very, ascribe a ‘very’, prescribe an ‘extremely psychologically harmed’, they enacted pain projected vitriol. a death of a child. a baby. they are the wolves on the side of the hill wanting to merge with the moss. to cry is to cry is to cry. I haven’t been able to trust longevity because I have never seen it. I know the word ‘longevity’. longevity. like cavity, a soft warm womb where people go unknowing in love, like a foetus conceived by two. him and I. I, hope so. our house our home, a child? our house our home our love. our longevity a Klimt quilt, kiss in each stitch, love in the seams, sex textured. his self, my self. 

I really do like classical music. like butter like a good day. a firm kind hand pushes on my chest. pumping me full of anaesthesia like a flat tyre. how do you cure an intrusive thought. let it enter and not rape. it is not an obsession because I am not obsessed. I am the antithesis of obsessed in relation to the shit sacks shit crack. shit. is my method of sharing wrong, am I giving love in a strange way. should I say different things, should I alter. I want to marry him. is that anti the woman of today. what kind of woman am I? I know I know. I see I feel. mostly I feel and hear. my ears are my hands, hands, antennae.

 I feel 24 lifetimes of love for him. for life. music and art. my friends. food. Yes, I can say that I do. food is food and not rope any more. I want a career as well. obviously. I don't need to say that or any of this. Jiminy Cricket live, loud. I can’t even say that I miss performing because the desire morphed into omnipresent globules that bubble in the pit of me. the epitome of me. I do it in other ways, not because I want to, or because I am looking and searching and seeking to ‘find an alternative’.  I don't think about it. I just have to do it. bathrooms become a stage. toilet cubicles a close up. I should be able to celebrate myself. to see what I have. and I do. I’m not insecure, I don’t know what one word I would use to tag this wandering perforation.

my birthday is soon. on Monday it will be in ten days. I will be twenty four. I don’t want to live with this weird worry any more. this unfounded visual hellish replay. Why do I need to read something written by someone else to feel self assertion. Which again, I don't think is true. I am self assert. I assert my power. I look forward to running again. Exercise exorcises the perforation. Imbues me with strength. My strength. My music is lifting. I want to curb our life together. to live as our own people. I don't want him to think that I am clutching on for a sense of escape. it isn’t like that at all. nor am I clutching. I do like it when we hold each other, though. I feel we stand together as equals yet I admire him so greatly. its just love and admiration and respect. and more. we’re a deep sea. true and through. do I intellectualise everything? can nothing be left to the wordlessness. Am I a mercurial alien. sting. is my narrative voice somewhat ‘broken’, doomed to be askew? am I troubled restless unkempt. No. I do not think that at all.

From 24 years, each day is to be had, to be had, to be lived. We can live anywhere. Ireland, Stockholm, New York. I am not afraid. I know what love is I know what a life is. for our selves and for each other, both of us Odysseus. I shouldn’t worry that he wants to leave me, and I don’t, it is the theme tune of a misrepresented cruel phenomena, an insult to the real weighted love we so clearly have in infinite yield. ‘I shouldn't worry that he wants to leave me’ once more, insinuates I think this to be a rational thought, or at least a thought that I have had. It is perforated, filled with putrid spores that wheeze, wheeze when I stamp on its pathetic fungal head. I do not have the words to pertain to any true reflection of it, there is nothing true of it, it has no reflection, a ghost a ghost a ghost. the perforation is cemented over, each day another layer, each week the mixer triumphantly mixes for more to Beethoven’s 5th. My 24th year passing will solidify the wall and suffocate it, its black eyes leak out of its mottled skull. It is the morning of the rest of my life.

Words: Rosalía Nelson | Illustrations: Milagros Pico