I go to the store late at night and buy the ice cream my mom used to swear by on all of her worst days. There are three tubs of it in our freezer, all half eaten and neatly flattened on the top by scraping layers away with a spoon as I work my way to the bottom. I have no liking for the ice cream flavor and no liking for the parts of life that I have chosen to include in the grand scheme of “living”. I am grieving my life as I live it and am coming to understand that the way I am loved is likely not the way I need to be loved. In return for the love that I give, I receive things that I am afraid of.
My biggest fear is the potential conversation with an airplane stranger that I replay in my head whenever I think of the direction my life is headed. To the stranger on the plane, I eventually find myself saying right before deplaning:
Unfortunately, my husband couldn't tell you why I have so much mint chocolate chip ice cream in the freezer or where my favorite place to get coffee on a Saturday when he is working is or what book I am reading right now. Actually, it was only last week when I made dinner that he found out what my favorite food is.
Oh, well that's too bad, the stranger says politely, but I'm sure it's innocent enough. You are so young.
I tell the stranger that for years we had this love that was out of a book, where he kept a list of what my favorite things were and how he would take the lead every now and then because he knew I was tired of leading everything and everyone all on my own. I tell the stranger that lately (for the last ten years) just looking in the wrong direction (not even at someone else) gets me the silent treatment but he smiles and laughs with every woman and he jokes about how he would cheat by getting with his secretary's friend. I assume his lunches that I know he gets with her every Friday night when he should be with me are doing just that. I finally show the stranger the article I was reading for the entire plane ride: "How to Keep His Attention (even if he doesn't like you)." I say that Sally Rider, a blonde, tall, genius with words moreso than me, made very good points in her article. I noticed how I was doing something right by removing myself from his equation as often as I possibly could because he had been more proactive in all aspects of the relationship since I stopped offering to see him or help out around the house. He buys cheese when we are out which is nice because I eat a lot of it and he walks the dogs and sometimes he picks Clarisse up from daycare. She's not even mine, I don't know why all the responsibility for her falls on me and not her other mom, or my husband.
God he sounds like an asshole, the stranger repeats after almost every sentence which I punctuate firmly.
Yes, I say plainly, But he is mine and you have your own I am sure.
And to that, the stranger agrees with something.
I do, in fact, despise the man I’ve married and regret it firmly. Despising him is our final, desperate, act of intimacy. I no longer need him around, I no longer want him around, but we are closer than before through mutual acts of resentment and hatred. He has pulled my dying plants out of their pots, ripping their roots as he did so; he’s broken trinkets I’ve had since I could walk and told me I get too attached to objects as I cry over spilled milk (literally and figuratively). He reminds me of my father when he isn’t miming my mother. He makes promises that he cannot keep because he likes to make me smile. At least my father could admit he was full of bullshit. My husband likes to see that his words can satisfy me and for that, I messed up. I have stopped taking anything he says seriously and I assume the worst in almost everything he says or does. At my mother’s house which I’ve been secretly visiting because my husband does not like when I talk to my family much, she told me that it took years to “break in” my father. It makes me feel better for not having the energy to pack up and leave so I can pursue my deepest desire to be alone and free.
And at night, every night, he comes home loudly when I am trying to sleep because out of the two of us, I am the one with the nine-to-five. He gets everything I’ve cleaned dirty. So it is at 2am when I cannot fall back asleep that I clean everything back up because he never believed me when I said I couldn’t function correctly knowing my house was dirty. It is immediately after when I pull a tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream out of the freezer and think about my mother. The one thing she did right was warn me this was going to happen eventually.
The last thing I tell the stranger in this made up conversation is this:
Do you ever feel guilty for all the inane actions you do because you’re alive?