About A Cynic and a Sad Woman

There was something about the way he talked. He made anyone who was near him feel a sudden sense of unease. The way his words shot from his mouth like hot bullets, maiming all those who were in his proximity. There was this peculiar way he squinted his eyes so you weren’t sure if he was falling asleep or straining his eyelids to keep himself focused on evildoing.

            He was the type of man who didn’t believe in God. He was cynical about absolutely everything, from the long line up at the coffee shop to the very meaning of existence. In fact, he told me that he killed God. We were sitting out on the front porch one nigh staring at the stars. What do you see up there? he asked me. The heavens, I said. He smirked and told me that he killed God long ago. I thought the idea was impossible. And then he said in a suddenly stern voice: I have something to tell you. Because I’m wiser than you. I’m a man. I’ve been through more than you. God is in here…and then he prodded my forehead with his thick forefinger...in the imagination. It is a thought, just like any other. You see, as soon as the thought of God stepped into my mind, I killed it. I destroyed the very notion of God from my mind. I killed God because God doesn’t exist.

            I was taken aback by his brashness. We sat out on that porch until all the stars lost their meaning. The heavens turned from my salvation into pointless, scattered balls of glowing gas. That was the day that I killed God, and my life has been a miserable, vast expanse of melancholy ever since. Just like a stars in the sky, I have become an insignificant spot of temporal light in a sea of nothingness.

            Of course I was in love with him. Don’t you love those who hurt you the most? He never hurt me physically. He never once took advantage of my feeble, feminine emotions. He never pushed me aside or threatened me with knives or pot lids. He hurt me because he drained every strand of hope out of me. He squeezed the very last drop of juice out of my fruitful veins. Although I am only twenty-five years old, I appear to be at least ten years older. My face is dry and sour like the rind of a lemon.

            I’m not sure why I love him. He is nonchalant about everything. And he takes pride in nothing. He drifts through life like a vagabond on a cardboard raft. Maybe that is exactly the reason I am so intrigued by him. I’m so preoccupied with attaching significance to every last piece of thread. He scolds me and says that a missing thread doesn’t make a difference because no one can notice it. He assures me that everything is the way it should be. He loves me because I silently agree with his philosophies.

            One time we were eating at Red Lobster and he got down on one knee and presented me with an underwhelming little ring. He handed me the ring so casually that I dismissed it as an early birthday gift and I smiled and said thank you. Then I took a cold shrimp from the platter that we were sharing. I waved to the waiter and requested a refill of marinara sauce. Meanwhile my would-be fiancé sulked from across the table and asked me if I was going to say yes to his proposal. I said yes. We ate shrimp and searched for wedding cakes on our phones the rest of the night.

            I never got a formal education. I don’t do much with my days. The hours just pile on top of each other until they get so heavy that I’m forced to go to sleep. The next morning I recharge and the cycle starts anew. My husband, on the other hand, travels to his office by subway everyday and he comes home when the stars are out. I imagine him flirting with bobble headed college girls on his train rides home. He probably does, for all I know. Who am I to stop it?

            I feel like a child who has not yet learned how to read an analogue clock. I can only tell the time based on the lengths of the shadows cast on the green bedroom walls. I can only set a timer while preparing spaghetti. I only know that it is night time when my husband has come home from work. He usually flings his tie onto the bedroom rug and prepares himself a dirty martini. At the end of the day, his dress shirt is soaked with all the smells that he has encountered that day- his morning coffee, stacks of old paperwork, the suffocating scent of thirty strangers cramped into a sweaty subway train. Then he flings himself onto me and once he is done he falls asleep. I lay there for hours before falling asleep, feeling as motionless and abandoned as the wrinkled tie on the floor, unable to pick myself back up.

            Today I looked in the full-length mirror hanging on the wall and I prodded my expanding belly. Then I went to the washroom and regurgitated the remains of last night’s spaghetti. When my husband came home, I was sitting on the wooden railing of the front porch and I asked to drink an olive martini with him. He told me the drink would be too strong for me so he gave me a cosmopolitan instead, but to me it tasted like liquid venom. We sat on the front porch and I stared up at the stars until I became so sad that I buried my face in the arch of his collarbone. When I looked up at him I saw a deepness in his eyes, like that of the universe, containing nothing yet everything at the same time. And since God wasn’t watching, I drank and drank until I was sure that I had killed the little cynical person that was growing inside of me.