A Glass Winter 4
By M T M
- 248 reads
Theo, wearing only shorts, sat on the kitchen counter. The heat in the apartment was almost too much to bear, but he would bear it, he had to. Out of his usual composure his legs dangled aimlessly, he head hung staring at the floor. There was a thimble on the ground, he wondered for a second how on earth it had gotten there but quickly decided he didn’t care. Something like rock bottom was hitting his shoulders and making them slump. Sweat was getting into his eyes. He could hear the faintly muffled sobs of his wife through the door. And then silence. Now he was worried, she’d been left alone too long already.
He found her on the floor, but she wasn’t crying anymore, in fact she wasn’t moving at all. “Vanessa” He said in a weary tone. No response. Their white duvet was half on the floor with her. “Vanessa?” He said again. Nothing.
“If you really loved me you’d let me die”
Theo had fallen asleep but awoke with a jump at her voice. She hadn’t moved. She hardly moved at all anymore. He had to carry her to the bath and wash her like a child. Months it had been now, it had never lasted this long before, even Rayleen couldn’t get through. She had left the week before, sobbing and apologising but sure that she couldn’t take one more day. The silence was the hardest thing, he missed having someone to talk to. He missed every detail of their lives, telling her it was raining, telling her to eat more, drink less, take care of herself, its cold today wear a scarf.
“You have to eat something” He said, expecting no reply.
She was still Vanessa, still his wife. But the shame of not being able to love someone completely when so inaccessible. How do you remain in love with someone so broken, if even a person she was, he caught himself seeing her as more of a shell. An empty vessel. Again and again his thoughts rested on another, for hours at a time now. Bouncing bright brown curls, and a smile. What he wouldn’t give for just a smile from his wife. There is only so much one man can take.
He came to, Vanessa was sitting against the far wall staring at him. She held his gaze and
it was more contact than they’d had in weeks. Her wide eyes were terrified, she had seen. She knew at that moment, that it had finally gone too far. Beyond the point of no return. Vanessa had just witnessed that once unassailable love coming untethered. It had been hanging by threads for months now. But finally, in this moment. It had come undone. She could almost see it flying away, the blind panic of a child losing grip of their balloon, watching the joy of it evaporate and drift off. Theo no longer loved her.
*
“For the longest time, maybe more than a year, I fully had the intention to kill myself. Not immediately, not even soon but eventually. It seemed logical to me. With no intention of living the nightmare of growing old, incapable and losing all one’s dignity it seemed the best course. A cleaner solution I thought.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to live, I had every intention of living my life. But is it not better to choose how to live, why then is it so abhorrent too choose how to die. At the proper moment. All I kept remembering was that line: ‘Did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely’”
“Woolf”
“The one and only” Vanessa smiled but stopped suddenly, his eyes were solemn as always but more so now than she had ever seen them. He continues slowly, as if afraid that too many words would fill up the room and stifle them both.
“You said” His notebook placed calmly on a low table, “’For the longest time’ What then changed your mind. At what point, did you realise that this drastic course of action was not, as you put it, a ‘solution’”
“Well, that’s just it. It is drastic. It was naïve really, I didn’t realise at the time but I was clinging to the idea that my life couldn’t possibly amount to what, in everyone else’s life, seemed the inevitable conclusion”
“Which is what exactly?”
“Oh, you know” she closed her eyes “Every day the same, the death of passion, the putting away of childish dreams. I think perhaps I never wanted to grow up, let alone grow old. I always preferred to look at the world at a distance, from the outside. It seemed so defeatist or… conformist to admit that I was part of it. Here on this lump of rock flitting through the empty blackness, with only one lifetime to live, I never had any intention of wasting it doing anything less than exactly what I deemed worthy. Can you understand that?”
“We’ve all felt the triviality of our day to day lives give us pause. But still. We must go on. Surely you see that, you can never be outside, you are, and always will be a part of this world. You have no choice”
“You’re quite right of course. None of us have a choice. Nobody is extraordinary”
“And Theo?”
“What about him?”
“Was he party to this plan of yours, was it discussed. I can’t imagine it was raised without causing quite a stir, even between you two… as close as you are, and as similar.”
“Did I tell my husband” She replied slowly, “My husband who, as you know is the only reason we are sitting here having this conversation, that I was calmly and over an extended period planning my own suicide. No doctor, I didn’t see the value in that.”
“Perhaps not then as similar as you think. You were afraid to tell him. Because you knew what he would say, maybe afraid of what he might do?”
“Afraid?” She smiled briefly, and then looked quizzical, “Of Theo?”
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