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.
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