A Quiet Ending

“What do you want?”

He asked, enunciating the words in a way that sent splinters of fear throughout her already fragile mind. Her belly clenched with anxiety as though being attacked from the inside by a questing throng of interrogation points.

The pressure from such a question left her reeling. Should she tell the truth? It would be much simpler not to. There was an urge to allow things to remain the same and never tell him what she wanted. Because if she admitted how she felt, then everything would shatter as the fish tank had in their first marital home. The thermostat had overheated, and their tabby cats had eaten the struggling kaleidoscopic guppies, leaving a whirring, gaping hole at the centre of the room, dripping precariously upon the electrics. That was how it felt, like a continuous, torturous percolation. A fear of conductivity, which might ignite an uncontrollable blaze at any moment.

Silent, deep-rooted pain swam in her belly, making it hard to think. He asked if she wanted him anymore, but there seemed only one question she could contemplate. What would happen to her if she answered negatively and said she wanted it to end? It was a despicable thing to think at a time like this, selfish and mercenary, but then it was a loathsome situation in which to find herself. She could admit she loved him but that was no longer enough. She peered at her computer screen, a deluge of tears dissolving into small fissures beside worn keys where tremulous fingers rested. She had been working at her desk and had been taken off guard when she heard his voice from behind his painting easel. He had not looked at her as though he was passing the time of day with a stranger who had stopped to chat while perusing his art. She had not turned in her seat.

Twenty-one years of marriage had once been a proud milestone, even the twenty before it, but something had broken irrevocably in the past months. A kind of quiet ending permeated their life. Neither one had argued or caused a fuss. Somehow that had become the way. Perhaps that was the problem. Somewhere along the line, neither found enough will to care anymore.

Execrable COVID could be blamed, but she knew it was a thinly veiled excuse, for the problems had been there long before. She tried to think when it began. Perhaps the miscarriage, followed by an inability to bear children. The passionate fights early on over money or growing apart or the age gap. All those things one promises when taking marriage vows had hung over them endlessly, and she felt like a fraud, someone now teetering on the periphery of societal boundaries because she had pledged and been unable to deliver.

To try to justify how they had found themselves here, she ran through each occurrence in her head, trying to pinpoint something, anything to which she could wholly apportion blame.

The room where they had once known happiness swallowed her, leaving her in the tiniest of pockets surrounded by the distorted, blinding spotlight of her desk lamp and not by far enough oxygen. Being interrogated into revealing one’s deepest fears and secrets was what she imagined torture by the KGB might feel like, for she was a closed book. Nobody had ever been able to compel her to tell her truth if she was not so inclined.

They say people repress feelings, but her slew of layers was akin to a replica of a 19th-century frigate in a bottle, with no idea how the little vessel had got inside. One would need to ease the cork out to examine its contents with a beady eye, firstly reducing the pressure with a needle and risking its contents disassembling to minuscule, decaying timber if utmost care was not taken.

He spoke again.

“If we do this now, then we will be able to remain good friends.”

Rather than beginning to resent or detest each other, the underlying was left unsaid.

They had stopped communicating. Of course, they discussed the things that mattered, of their worries for others in their large family. Long nights of lovemaking and talking during the early days had been lost in a chasm filled with belongings, materiality, and other fatuous parts of their lives. That which had once drawn them together caused them to become disjointed and fragmented. They found themselves standing in a precarious position atop amassed irritations and reminiscences, like a raft creaking and swaying, unbalanced as they no longer clung to each other through the assaults of life but attempted to surf wide footed against the incoming tide. They stared at one another fearfully as the pontoon floated over the crevice that had opened between them, asking one another what they needed from life and distressed by the knowledge it was no longer each other.

He had been his sensible self and had acknowledged the inevitable almost absently. He said he needed to know if she would stay with him while he was at his lowest. He struggled to find himself once more through shrouded mental issues, exacerbated by his work throughout the pandemic. He knew the only way to ascend from this point was to disencumber himself from all that attacked his psyche. He needed to know if he would be doing that with her by his side. By now, he had the inkling he would not.

During the epidemic, the fears everyone had for loved ones had concealed underlying issues within the relationship. The time spent together in lock-down had become monotonous, and they snapped, feeling confined, one unable to go anywhere in the small flat without falling over the other. Everywhere they went, they found exasperating evidence of one another. The tiniest and most risible things caused irritation. Inactivity, and a propensity to overeat, became the norm, as did seeking solace in the television and binging social media. These circumstances were by no means unusual. Almost everyone in the world had been experiencing the same issues. But they were not everyone in the world. They were the once indissoluble team who had prided themselves on fighting through each of life’s complications. That said, it had never been easy for them, and the constant battle to carve out a life for themselves had come at a price. Now was the time of their reckoning.

They had loved fiercely, consumedly. She remembered the way his face had looked to her on their wedding day all those years before, worshipful. Though, that was partly the problem. To be the esteemed one, relied upon to be everything, had become arduous. There was only so much an alliance could take before it began to decompose into component elements, diverging from the once reliably distinguishable to disorder. She had once said a piece of paper meant nothing. Neither did a ring if there was no tangible love, or they were broken. She wondered if it were a foreshadowing, but it seemed unlikely that she would attempt to sabotage her marriage before it began.

He had his faults, as did she. They had become so commonplace that she barely noticed them anymore. She pondered whether she was experiencing a mid-life crisis, or this was absolute desperation, a hunger to begin life anew. She was sure she would never find a man like him again. Regardless of his imperfections, he had supported her, been there for her whenever she needed him. It felt like a colossal betrayal to leave. She knew, though, that she had thought of leaving many times before, and an ingrained code of loyalty had made her stay, even though nothing had ever changed. They made plans and promises to one another, told of aspirations never realised.

Still, she kept her silence, even though she knew he solicited an answer. Taciturn because she knew whatever she said now would cause hurt to a man she had come to think of as her closest friend. Sometimes she wondered if it would be easier if they both shrieked and blurted out harsh words, then realities might come to light, savage as they may be. The days of zealous, spirited, and sometimes ferocious disputes had dissipated and been lost, like the return of temperateness the morning after a magnificent and thrilling electrical storm. Still, in those days, they had always communicated, even if it had not been in the healthiest of ways.

She knew her prolonged silence had already given him his answer. It had floated like a nimbus cloud above the chasm, ready to rain down indecision, false hope, and retribution like the befuddled shroud of omicron about to engulf them.

She was no longer willing to settle.

“I don’t know.”

Her chest hitched as she spoke, her throat constricted as if an unknown entity had grasped it with thick, spiritless tendrils, coercively massaging her larynx to bring forth the words.

“I don’t think we are good for each other anymore. It seems like there’s nothing left.” She said.

He nodded. His face was impassive, unperturbed. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, but his medication had become a safeguard against sentimentality, a buffer to withhold emotion. It was how he had been able to broach the question at all. She could not blame him for it, though she could have wept for the man who had once felt secure enough to sob in her arms.

It seemed there was nothing left to say, but she knew that sooner or later, grief would pour out of her like a sickness that had been sealed inside her for years, filled with bile and tears that would make her cry until she could no longer breathe. It would explode from her like the exoplasm in doctored Victorian seance daguerreotypes and would still provide insufficient relief.

She decided to sit at her desk and write within chaos while every part of their life was strewn around her like the pacific trash vortex, the maelstrom of an upturned life, buoyant and no longer retained by their coupling. The storyteller within her needed to explain, to write him a letter, not a Dear John letter but a letter that encapsulated her gratitude for all he had done. She felt a need to remind him of the confidence he had instilled in her, of the happiness they once shared. She couldn’t be sure if it were a last desperate attempt not to be cast as the villain of the scene, the one who broke them because she could not yet answer his questions and had already decided to leave. The one who had felt a sense of relief when he had asked the question. She found she cared little to be portrayed this way because she realised that the blame lay somewhat with her. She had been the one to change, morph into someone who knew there was more to life than this. This comfort no longer provided the environment she needed to thrive. At an immutable point, they had stalled, lay stagnant and clogged their relationship with things that didn’t matter, each one forgotten over the years until those things now encumbered them as a couple like a fatberg that might never disperse.

Finally, there would be an end, and all the anxieties of the weeks leading up to the conclusion would diffuse. It seemed so far away. The fear of being alone ate at her insides, and she felt like she had died, trapped in the house with her cat, who had begun to eat her corpse from the belly outwards while she levitated in some distant dream. Every nibble made to decaying flesh sensed through a shroud of imagined post existence.

There was still hope that the chasm would solidify one day, that a sober grounding would fill the void. It would be cultivated with lush abundance, smattered with luminous sunflowers manifesting along with comfort in each one’s skin. She aspired to hold her hand out to him in friendship, visualising that he would accept and hug her tightly. He would tell her, though it was gruelling and soul-destroying to let go, that what they had done was right, and she would be vindicated.