What She Couldn't Say

I’m here alone with her in this room. I can hear her breath being monitored. So much hushing for a simple machine. She would like it that way: Hushed and breathing deep.

I don’t know how she got here, except that she probably got her hands on Fentanyl again. She is forever running away, my wife.

Yesterday when I got home, I saw her sitting placidly on the front porch, reading one of her new biographies. She seemed so at peace. Winter is coming, so she will be spending a lot of time reading in her room. I asked her who she was reading about this time, and she quipped, “Oh, you know. People. Their lives are so complicated. Is my life complicated? To you?”

I didn’t know how to respond. “It’s only as complicated as you make it,” I finally said. She pursed her lips and slightly nodded. She looked toward the empty street and inhaled deeply as if I had just touched an important nerve. I didn’t mean to offend her. I was just telling the truth.

Her lips are so pale and earthy. Red lipstick is what ought to be there. It would be the first thing she did if she were to wake up right now. Color her lips “so the show will go on,” she’d say. She must have gotten it from her days in theatre. She will always say she wishes to be a famous actress. I’m afraid she would be dead sooner if this were the case.

I don’t know where the doctor is. How he or she must have been one of the first to reach her in time. How the stories will shift from each person’s perspective. My instinct is to think she didn’t know where she would end up. I am alone with my stories right now. I guess I will always be alone with them. But I liked her to share them with.

How she must have felt an hour before she copped the pills. Maybe she was there bored out of her mind. Maybe something scared her. Maybe the pain of reality was too marked this time. The same old drab kitchen. The poem she is never able to finish. The coffee cups—all mismatched face down in uneven rows. Maybe it was just the need for her body to feel good again. To feel numb, entombed in her own mind without the need to attend to anything. It’s all temporary.

I wrap my hands around her. She doesn’t show any sign of feeling me.

She was fine this morning. About 4:00 a.m., I walked out of the bathroom and heard our teacup dog sneezing reversely, and this has always alarmed her. I heard her softly placate the dog, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay. It will end in a second. You’re okay.” When the dog stopped, she must have fallen back to sleep.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. It has been on my mind to leave her for a while. I can’t watch her kill herself. It pierces me too deeply.

The sunlight from the room is of a different quality now. It is forming an arc over her body, as if pleading for her to come with it. She is almost too bright for her body. Or perhaps too dark. The internal pain she always feels must dance in the dark with her. She gives in to anything it says and follows its lead into the realm of dying. Nobody has died more than she has.

I remember my wedding vows to her, but the worst is just worse. She deserves better, and perhaps that means I must free her completely—and free myself. I’ve learned not to take it personally anymore. She is squaring up with the ghosts within her, and I don’t see much help I can give. Ghosts, I believe, need the sunlight of possibility. Perhaps to build a new corporeal chance to realize she’s bigger, much larger than, the fictional. And that none of it needs to be feared.

But who am I? I am the one watching her right now. Watching her, wishing she would just watch herself.

I’ll wait until she wakes up.

If she does.

It is not too cursed to just sit and wait. And watch.