When my husband comes into the bedroom we have shared for thirteen years and tells me he doesn’t want to be married anymore, I reach for my neck. My husband has cut it off surreptitiously. The air in the room thins as he fills it with justifications, all the ways he is unhappy, the reasons why we aren’t right for each other anymore.
I tell him to stop, stop talking, can’t he see that I can no longer breathe. He looks startled, as though he doesn’t understand what I mean, as though he isn’t holding it right there, my head in his hands. Before he entered, I was sitting at the small table I use as a desk, pretending to work on my novel.
But the annotated outlines and handwritten notes from a decade earlier concealed what I had actually been studying, quietly, for the last year: my own birth chart, set in a circular zodiacal wheel. He came into the room soundlessly, which was unlike him. My husband was noisy in the way he moved, ate and slept.
His feet were heavy, the floors in our house creaking under them, his body cutting through air and whistling wherever it went. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, bouncing gently as though he had to go to the bathroom. I hastily covered the chart.
I noticed that he had closed our bedroom door. It was April, and the white flowers were blooming on the Bradford Pear in our yard, the semen-stench wafting through the open window beside me. But my familiar feeling of revulsion at that scent evaporated as my husband launched into the story of his misery.
From the beginning, from his first sentence, the conclusion was forgone. Every argument he had carefully accumulated pointed in the same direction. He was fluent in all of the ways that we were incompatible.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
