Till Death, or, A Wife's Message to Her Husband

Nobody told me this at my wedding, but “till death do you part” is bullshit.

Mostly this is because nobody wants to kill the mood. It’s a wedding. There’s cake. Everyone is supposed to be happy and dancing to whatever cheesy 80’s and 90’s pop songs the DJ is playing. One of the bridesmaids is supposed to be blowing the best man in the fancy bathrooms where a man hands you a towel and a mint every time you go to take a piss.

C’mon everybody. Laugh, eat and be joyful. We spent a lot of money on this.

The truth that no one tells you is, five years from now, you won’t be married to the person you exchanged vows with.

Time does that to people. Don’t think that any of us are immune to it.

John, when I met you, I fell in love. Five years ago, that’s the kinda person I was. 19 years old, and ready to become obsessed with someone who was obsessed with me. I needed a sort of anchor in my life, some primal reason to exist. I needed something that seemed eternal.

They say you form your first impression of someone within the first 30 seconds of meeting them. That’s how poorly we know most of the people in our lives. That’s how much someone’s façade means to us.

That feeling I got when I first laid eyes on you, those butterflies that fluttered in my stomach the first time you talked to me, I wanted to feel that way forever. Now I think about it, and it’s just chemicals. Just little reactions happening inside my body.

Those feelings, they don’t last for long.

It’s not that I was necessarily stupid when I was 19, but I hadn’t realized that the only thing that stays constant is change.

No one is immune to it. To be honest, when I wake up in the morning and notice you sleeping next to me instead of my loving husband, I shouldn’t be surprised.

John, five years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that you were going to become some unrecognizable shithead monster. That’s how naïve I was. I thought you would never hurt me.

Anymore, hurting each other is the only thing we know how to do.

Ignorant or innocent, I’m not sure which described me better early in our marriage. Maybe that’s what you liked about me; I was yours to manipulate, and you knew it. Either way, what I learned the first couple of weeks being married to you is that pain is an abstract.

I had to learn that lesson, John, because living with you just plain hurt.

In the beginning, when it was just little things, I told myself, “Well, this is just what marriage is. There are certain things you’ll just have to accept.” I started reminding myself that on our honeymoon.

Remember? Remember the sex? All two minutes of it? I’d be surprised if you remembered, you were pretty drunk. Hell, so was I; it was our goddamn honeymoon.

Remember how you just groaned, squeeze your drunk eyes shut, and then it was all over? Remember how you’d just fall asleep a half minute after you came?

The detachable showerhead was my best friend the whole fucking honeymoon. Still, even then, I was thinking about how in love with my husband I was.

John. Confident and bold and passionate, that was you, John. Smiling at times and brooding at times, fun and sure of yourself and handsome and suave, I gag when I think about you now. If I ever need to vomit, I’ll just picture you naked.

But I just kept reassuring myself that, well, this is what it means to be married to the person you love. Even after the honeymoon, even after living with you for a couple of months, I kept telling myself that I would just have to accept certain things about you, that I loved you for who you are, that I wasn’t going to control you.

Denial, that’s the word.

Pain is an abstract, and I know that because it didn’t physically hurt when I stayed awake until 3 in the morning, waiting for you to walk through the front door. You have late shifts, I told myself. You work hard, I told myself. You’re free to go out with your friends. I’d be telling myself this shit while I watched the kitchen clock tick off seconds, then minutes, then hours, until I fell asleep.

This is the kind of self-deception that human beings do when they’re trying to ignore that sad, empty, lonely feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It’s like the butterflies were replaced with a black hole. More chemicals.

Not that it helped when you did come home. I’d be sitting at the kitchen table, my head propped against my folded arms, and I’d jump when all the sudden, the front door bursts open.

Maybe you didn’t notice, John, but there’s a mark, an indent from all the times the doorknob smashed into the drywall.

And in you’d come, John. Loud, funny, brazen, bad boy John, you’d be so goddamn drunk that you couldn’t even walk without smashing into the walls yourself. Your work clothes, the suit and shirt and tie that we went out and bought for you, everything would be wrinkled and stained.

The way you smell when you’ve been out drinking, the smell of beer and whiskey and sweat and who knows what else, it’s the way I imagine gas chambers smelled.

What’s worse is how you would grab me. I’d jolt the fuck awake when I heard the front door destroying our security deposit, in time to watch you stumble into the kitchen, chuckling to yourself.

I never did find out what you thought was so funny.

When you’d see me, you’d lick your lips. It was like watching a hungry cartoon character looking at a slice of cake. More things to think about if I want to puke.

Strong, tall, dreamy, passionate John, the man I married, you, you’d grab my arm, hoist me out of my chair, and carry me off to the bedroom. Some nights, carrying was a little outside your capacity, so you’d just drag me.

Remember?

Whatever clothes I was wearing, you’d just tear them off.

Remember?

I lost my favorite pair of underwear that way. You ripped them right off my ass. I would have patched them up, stitched everything back together with other fabrics, but then would they still be my favorite underwear?

That’s what I asked myself, John, instead of:

“What the hell was happening? What the fuck was going on?”

Truth is, I didn’t want to ask myself those questions.

So, instead of thinking about it, I would do your laundry the next morning. I washed and dried and ironed your gross shirt from the night before. I folded all of your shit and made sure everything went into a drawer. I organized your whole goddamn domestic life, and then I made breakfast for us both.

And when I think about it, it’s shocking, the amount of pain a human being can endure.

When this became a regular thing, instead of thinking about it, I thought, “Well, at least it’s quick.”

By the end of the first year, living with you, I was numb. By the end of the fourth year, I never laughed, but at least I never cried. Even when you came home with lipstick smeared on your face or with other women’s G-strings in your pockets, even then, there’s too much other shit in life that could occupy my time. Groceries, thinking about going back to school, paying bills, filling taxes, working a job, it’s busy work, being an adult. And if you keep yourself busy enough, you’ll never have the time or energy to wonder how this became your life. Introspection becomes a luxury that you can’t afford.

The best was I can explain it is the feeling that I was trapped inside my own life. From sun-up to sun-down, I’m stuck watching the nauseating melodrama that is my life unfold right before my eyes.

Still, it’s nothing I couldn’t handle.

After five years of this shit, I convinced myself that I was strong. You know you have to be pretty strong to be in denial for that long. I had convinced myself that I was immune to whatever bullshit was headed my way.

But John, not after tonight.

Remember, John? Remember how you threw the door open, then slammed the fucking thing shut like you were angry at it? Remember how your face was covered in bubblegum pink lipstick? Maybe you don’t remember, but you smelled like a strip club built on a goddamn landfill. Your regular stench was mixed with cheap perfume, that sort of wet dog stink that I could taste.

Remember what you said, John?

“Hey babe. Whydunchu come wif me?”

And, John, there are certain pains that you can abstract, then there are pains that just hurt. Getting your fingernails ripped off with pliers, for example. Or getting your teeth ripped out. There’s just no getting around the fact that you’ll be in agonizing, blinding pain. If you’re a guy, I have to imagine that getting your testicles smashed into mush or getting your dick mutilated would be simply excruciating.

John, what I learned tonight, thanks to you, is that anal sex, it’s just one of those pains that I can’t abstract. And the way I feel about my life, it’s not a pain that I wish to abstract anymore.

“Till death do us part.” Oh, John, I wouldn’t kill you. You wouldn’t learn anything if I killed you.

You can’t feel anything if you’re dead.

You fell asleep after you came, like always, so I shook you awake. John, drunk, stupid, clueless John, it’s incredibly to believe that you’re the man I wanted to spend my whole life with. Looking at me with your confused, half-open eyes, mouth agape, your drooling on the sheets that I fucking washed.

John, how does this feel?

Your sleepy eyes, they get real big when they feel the scissors. My shin is across your throat, so I’m kneeling on your neck. The veins in your face bulge and your skin is becoming the color of an eggplant. You can keep trying to swat me away with your arms, but it doesn’t seem to be doing you much good.

John, does this hurt?

The scissors, it’s not easy to get them closed. This is different than cutting through a piece of paper, and with your squirming, you know this isn’t going to be a clean cut.

Eyes rolled up into the back of your skull, tongue flopping around in teeth, if you had any air in your lungs, you’d be screaming at me. Calling me all those names that just show how much you love me.

Bitch. Whore. Crazy fucking cunt. Stupid goddamn cocksucking slut.

Instead, you’re choking on my fucking knee. Maybe it’s just that you can’t breathe, maybe it’s because I didn’t make the cleanest cut, but tears are streaming steadily down the side of your face, down your temples, soaked up by the pillowcase.

John, when the scissors finally snip off what little you have down there, what does it feel like? When I finally easy my leg off your throat and you use your first breath to scream so loud it hurts my ears, what are you feeling? When you feel the stub that’s all that’s left of your cock, what’s going through your mind?

“YOU CRAZY BITCH!”

John, I can’t help but disagree. This is the first sane thing I’ve done since I married you, you piece of shit.

I’m not the same person you married, John. Time does that to people.

I used to love you, but now, I’m getting rid of this useless prick.