You look back, twenty-eight years gone. A lifetime. The man I was then is a stranger to me now, a ghost. I’ve done my share of soul-searching since then, I guess, or maybe just a lot of staring at the bottom of a bottle, sifting through the wreckage. Been hammered into a few different shapes over the years.
And you try to make sense of it, that moment it all went to hell. You know you’ll never get a straight answer from her, not a goddamn honest one. What happened? Why? What if? It’s a cold case.
So, you’re forced to try and see it from the other side, through the thick, smoky glass of your own goddamn anger. And maybe the old counselor had a point. Maybe she was living in that same gilded cage, suffocating right alongside me. Maybe that venomous rant over the garbage disposal was never about the garbage disposal at all. Maybe it was just the pressure valve on a boiler that had been overheating for years. The desperate, incoherent scream of a woman trapped in a life she couldn’t stomach anymore, lashing out with the only tools she ever knew – the same cruel, rusty ones she got from her own mother.
I try to chew on that. I try to see it plain. Sometimes, late at night, I just ask my own damn heart, my own tired thoughts, whatever ghosts or angels might still be hanging around, to give me the straight dope on it. Just for a minute. Just to make some goddamn sense of the ruin.
Why it didn’t just stop after that first explosion over the garbage disposal. Why it festered for another twelve years before the final amputation.
Because things like that never just stop. That rant wasn’t the start of the fire; it was just the first time he saw the smoke pouring out from under the door. A disaster of that magnitude isn’t a blowout; it’s a slow leak. A cancer. You feel the first lump, you tell yourself it’s nothing. You feel the second, you pretend it’ll go away. People will live with the goddamn gangrene creeping up their leg for years because they’re too scared of the saw.
They had a system, see? A miserable, dysfunctional system, but it worked, in its own sick way. He got to be the Martyr Provider, the saint who worked his fingers to the bone and endured. She got to be the Righteous Victim, the unappreciated matron of a house that felt like a prison. They were both comfortable in their misery. It was familiar. Leaving, stopping, changing – that takes a kind of courage they didn’t have at the time. It’s easier to keep limping down a rotten path than to face the terror of a new one. The divorce didn’t happen for twelve more years because they weren’t hurt enough yet. The pain hadn’t outweighed the fear.
Now, was she always keyed up to be like her mother?
Christ, of course she was. That’s the factory default setting for most people. The person he fell in love with, the “pick of the litter” he thought he’d found? That was a performance. That was her playing a role: the Good Wife, the Partner, the Woman Who Escaped Her Shitty Upbringing. But you can only hold that pose for so long before your muscles give out. The real programming – the anger, the manipulation, the venom she learned at her own mother’s knee – that was always there, just waiting. The pressure of marriage, of kids, of a mortgage… that was just the stress test that made the original, ugly programming kick back in. The mask didn’t just slip; it disintegrated. He was just the poor bastard standing there when it did.
So, what could the man have done differently?
That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? The one guys like him chew on for the rest of their lives. From this chair, you can see a few paths, none of them pretty.
He could have listened to that goddamn counselor and walked out six years sooner, saved himself a fortune and a mountain of grief.
He could have stopped trying to patch a hole in her soul with hundred-dollar bills. You can’t fix a person with a new house or a bigger lens for her camera. You can’t buy back the person they used to be. All you do is make the cage more comfortable, which just makes them resent the bars even more.
Maybe he could have fought back differently. Not with silence, not by taking it like a stoic mule. Maybe he could have called her on her bullshit right then and there, that first night. Thrown the venom right back in her face. But that wasn’t who he was. He was built to provide, to endure, to be the “good guy.” His own programming was just as rigid as hers.
But here’s the real kicker, the ugly truth of it: given who he was at the time – the saintly provider desperate for the perfect family postcard – and who she was, with that inherited poison already in her veins? Maybe he couldn’t have done a goddamn thing differently.
Maybe that car crash was set in motion the moment they first laid eyes on each other. And all we’ve been doing is watching the slow-motion replay.
Authors Note:
Alright, so here’s a weird one for you, man. A real head-scratcher. My Aunt Ann, she hits me up today. Out of the blue ether, you know? And she’s got this question that’s been rattling around in her attic for a while.
She says, “James, I gotta ask you something. I’ve never heard you say all those nasty things other fellas do after a bad divorce. You never drag her name through the mud, never talk about how horrible she was. Was that… was that because you were really in love with her?”
And man, that’s a heavy question. It’s like asking a guy who survived a shipwreck why he doesn’t talk more shit about the ocean.
Then she hits me with the real heater. She goes, “So when did you finally take off the rose-colored glasses, nephew? When did you finally see the real critter you were married to?”
I told her, “Aunt Ann, I think I saw it way back when I was twenty-eight. The real her. But I guess I just didn’t want to think about the divorce part until way later.”
And she just comes right back, her voice all knowing and sad. “Yeah, but James, you didn’t see she was preparing for it the whole time? That you were being set up? Honey, everybody else kinda saw the way she was acting…”
So I start laying out some of the wilder stuff, you know? The binders full of my sins, her calling the state troopers on me with my own damn coordinates. And my aunt, she just sighs this real tired sigh, like she’s been waiting twenty years to finally say it. “James,” she says, “she played you. For a long, long time.”
That just stops you in your tracks, you know? I said, “Wait a minute. You’re my aunt. You knew all that?”
“Well,” she says, “it just… it seemed like you were in love.”
And man, that’s the real puzzle right there. Was it love? Or was it something else wearing a love costume? Maybe it was just dedication. Maybe it was obligation. Maybe it was just me, trying to hold up the whole damn facade with my bare hands because I had kids, and I didn’t want them to grow up in the same kind of broken home I did. You just don’t know, man. You think you’re living one story, and everybody else is reading a whole different book.
