8. A Burning Building

A Burning Building

M ara

Sometimes I cry.

Every day I tell myself how lucky I am. And I am lucky, I am, in fact, blessed.

I have a husband who loves me and is committed to our family. He tells me daily, emphatically, that he loves me. Our child is healthy and our greatest joy. She loves her dad and I, and I think she knows she’s loved in return.

We have a happy home despite our challenges.

Our community is safe.

There are opportunities for all of us.

But.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I see nothing that would inspire him to reach for me. I press half-moons into the soft flesh of my thighs with my fingernails to soothe the ache.

Sometimes I wonder why he married me in the first place.

Sometimes my heart bleeds, sliced open by his rejection, my throat closes tight around my grief, and my spirit shrinks to nothing inside of me.

Sometimes I worry that I’m a fool to believe he loves me as he claims he does, because surely that kind of love should prohibit this kind of pain?

Sometimes my tears fall in an endless silent stream as he sleeps beside me.

Sometimes I cry.

Overwhelmed by fear and shame,

Beaten by pain and anxiety.

Battered by an inner tyrant who bludgeons my soul, with rarely a reprieve, except for when he touches me. The tyrant does not relent right away, it takes time to drown out her voice.

He loves me with his hands and his mouth and his body. He holds me close. He builds the pleasure low in my belly and snags my attention away from her. She is muted, and I know love, and I know truth. For those few precious moments, at the point where the pleasure eclipses the fear, where I am lost in him: lost in him, lost in me, skin to skin, sharing one breath, heat and sweat and tongues and lips, hands grasping, stroking, bodies pressing, straining, giving, and taking, for those precious moments I know the truth of his love for me. The pleasure coils tighter and tighter, then releases in wave after wave.

My body is relaxed, I am limp and cuddly in recovery. Slowly I stretch against him and my sensitized skin purrs against his warmth. For a few blissful seconds I am both empty and full. His hand strokes lazily up and down my side while I come down and then he begins to move away to clean up.

Like ripping a bandage off a third-degree burn, it is then that she comes screaming back, more vicious than before. She knows exactly what to say to incite fear, picking at scabs of shame, causing me to question and then doubt what I knew to be true just moments ago. I cling to him looking for relief, but he can't reach me now.

And he doesn’t know to try.

For the past couple of nights since my appointment, sleep eluded me. Added to that, it had been three or four days since we’d last made love. I was beginning to feel weird in my body. The world around me seemed to move in slow motion, as if I were seeing things through a wave of rippling heat. The anxiety that constantly churned in my gut was rearing up to choke me, grasping the sides of my larynx and pulling it around itself like a mantle .

Again, that night Zale was tired when he got home. I didn’t want to push, because that’s not right, and in any case, I couldn’t take further rejection. I needed something though. I was jittery and untethered. I needed the oblivion that sex offered. I needed the release.

I’d always had a high sex drive. We weren’t having a lot of sex. That, combined with the pressures of work, parenting, and my mother’s nonsense, was what was affecting my moods. I didn’t think the doctor understood the pressures I was under. If Zale and I could get back on track, I could handle the rest. I could see that sex wasn’t on the table for tonight, but I still needed something from him to ground me.

“Please touch me, honey.” I whispered as he curled toward me to go to sleep. I was sitting up reading even though I was sleep deprived. I needed the distraction from my own thoughts, my own anxieties, or I feared I would fly apart.

“What, baby?” he mumbled.

“Please, put your hand on me, anywhere, please,” I whispered back, my throat tight, my chest constricted.

He wrapped his hand around the inside of my upper thigh. I closed my eyes in relief. Took a deep breath. That’s an ownership touch. I love me an ownership touch. Only he touches me there, only he can touch me there. It reminded me I belonged. I went back to my book, focusing on the warmth of his hand on my thigh. After a minute he slid it away. My heart sunk and the tyrant was unleashed .

Of course, he doesn’t want to touch you. Why would he? You pant after him like a fucking dog ... you’ve got legs like tree trunks ... you’re moody, depressed, impatient … who would want you?

He’s just tired... the other voice tried to defend him but could not stand up to the tyrant.

Yeah, tired of your shit.

Nausea rolled over me. I brought my knees up, rested my elbows on my bent knees and covered my face with trembling hands. I tried to breathe evenly.

Distress. Choking. Panic.

It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

Oh, God, I need him to touch me.

The need was rising like a scream inside of me.

The geyser burst.

“Really?” I burst out.

He startled, fighting to come alert, his hand out, ready, eyes wide. “What’s the matter?”

Seeing his reaction, self-disgust plowed over me, which only served to aggravate me further, and turned my anger inwards. So many conflicting feelings fighting for supremacy. I choked on my next words, tears streaming down my face.

A plea .

“Is it so fucking hard to just give me your fucking hand?”

His expression composed then shut down. “I was sleeping, Mara.”

“I know you were sleeping; you’re always sleeping,” I hissed.

He rolled to his back, staring at the ceiling.

I curled away from him into a ball.

You ruin everything, I berated myself. Now he’ll be mad at you, and it will take even longer for him to touch you and calm the storm.

I closed my eyes tight but there was nowhere to hide from the despair and the shame. I fell asleep with my face wet with tears, feeling like the bitch I knew myself to be.

The next morning, I pretended I was asleep when he left for work, even when he pressed his lips to my forehead before leaving. Too ashamed to face him. Too ashamed that I lashed out at him after he’d just asked me for support the week before. Too ashamed that I needed him to stabilize me the way I did. All around too ashamed.

There were issues in our early years, jealousy, tantrums, rages, impulsive decisions, and even abuse, the memory of which viciously twisted the knife of remorse in my gut when I recalled the hurt I’d delivered.

Back then, it was trust issues that I believed to be at the root of our problems. If he noticed another girl, it was like a fist wrapped around my heart and squeezed, the life-giving blood oozing out between those brutal fingers .

My emotions flip-flopped between anguish and anger. The anguish would be accompanied by tears, and clinging, and his bewildered reassurances.

If I felt my place of importance in his life was threatened, there would be anger, accompanied by slamming doors, throwing things, and screaming. Zale would shut down, from shock as much as self-preservation. His shutdown increased my panic and despair, and that level of despair and anger could only be relieved with pain.

Pain in the form of the deep crescents left in my flesh from my nails, scratch marks on my thighs and my belly where no one would see, pulling my hair, digging my nails into my scalp, slapping my own face, these were the companions of the remorse and self-disgust that followed the anger.

There was one, and only one, instance where I physically hurt him instead of myself. We were at one of his company functions, an awards night that included spouses. The MC pulled him up on stage and partnered him with a female colleague for a skit. I watched him interact with this slim, successful, attractive woman, watched him smile at her, shake her hand for the demonstration.

Watching him smile and touch another woman filled me with such rage that I could think of nothing else in that moment. When he returned to our table, he sat and drew my hand through the crook of his arm. In my rage, I pinched the tender flesh of his inner arm, and I pinched it hard .

I watched his face as I did this. I saw the blood drain from it. I saw anger displaced quickly by the shuttering of all emotion in his eyes. The effect on me was immediate, my sorrow swallowed up my rage. I apologized immediately. No one noticed what I did. No one noticed his emotional withdrawal. I withdrew my hand. I did not deserve to touch him.

We got through the night and went back to our hotel room. He went straight to bed, unspeaking. I went to the shower, turned the water on as hot as I could stand it, let it turn my flesh hot and red as I dug my nails into my thighs and dragged them across the reddened skin over and over again until I could breathe.

After I scrubbed my skin dry, I crawled into bed beside him, careful not to touch him, my face and eyes swollen from crying. My stinging thighs allowed me to sleep. The next morning, I promised him nothing like that would ever happen again. I don’t know if he believed me at the time, but I was true to my promise. It never happened again, but it haunts me still. It’s a shadow that follows me, perhaps it follows us. I don’t know if he’s ever forgiven me.

Looking back, I don’t know when he learned to trust me again, or if he ever did. After that, more than before, when my emotions ran high, he withdrew.

I learned to lock them down.

Sex became a great stabilizer .

It was the only time I felt free of the fear that lived inside me. It was only then, when I had his full attention, when his body connected deep inside of mine, that I could feel his love for me.

Whatever was going on with him at work, with his thoughts about Olivia, our sex life had slowed down, and the anger and insecurity issues I thought I had sorted out, again became a problem for me.

Without sex, I was jittery and on edge, my emotions running the gamut from anguish to joy, often within the same hour. Increasingly often I took breaks to breathe, to transfer the pain to the outside, where it didn’t hurt nearly as much.

I was back in that space once again. Hence the doctor visit and the psychiatric referral. Which, in the end, was not that helpful. There was no medicine for my issues apparently. Which was fine, good even, I was not going to let it get out of hand. Even so, my needs warred with my responsibilities all that long day, until I was closed up, holding tightly to the reins of my bucking emotions.

Olivia volunteered at the animal shelter for the afternoon, which was good for her, bad for me. The house being empty gave me too much time and space to think. Girls’ Night was not on tonight, so I had little to prepare for, and nothing stimulating enough to distract me from my spiraling thoughts.

Olivia was quiet when she got home and retreated to the sunroom with Sirius to decompress. I should have used my free time to work, to clean up the house. I could have gone out to get my nails done or my hair trimmed. I could have bought myself a new outfit. Instead, I sat home and stewed, wondering if I should tell him.

I knew I probably should.

The bottom line was that our marriage was no longer working for either of us. I knew what I needed; he didn’t want to give it to me. Maybe he needed something else, someone else. I felt sick. I’d never kept anything from him before, but I felt this was the beginning of the end and I wasn’t quite ready to face it. Sadness permeated my entire being. I could not shake it.

I was quiet when he got home from work. We went through the regular routine with Olivia and dinner, made small talk at the kitchen table, but I was unable to meet his eyes. When we went to bed, I piled my pillows at my back, opened my book and put on my headphones, blasting Evanescence, Halsey, and Halestorm, allowing the heavy beats to beat back the distress, and save me from facing him.

When he was ready to call it a night, he clicked off the tv, curled toward me and slipped his hand under my thigh. A single tear welled and spilled over my cheek, soundless as always, and I moved my foot to rest against his warmth. He leaned in, kissed my thigh, and went to sleep.

I watched him for a little while. The frown between his brows didn’t disappear even in sleep. I gently smoothed it out with my index finger, not wanting to wake him but wanting somehow to soothe his angst .

I got up with him the next morning and hugged him before he left for work, lifted my face for his quick, hard kiss, a drop of rain to quench a burning building.

I went to the bathroom to get ready for the day. Before getting into the shower, I knelt on the floor and pulled my hair until I attained the relief I desperately craved, my system in a state of equilibrium once again when the pain on the inside gave way to the pain on the outside. I took a shower, brushed my skin with my sea sponge until it stung, conditioned my stinging scalp, roughly rubbed myself dry, put on my clothes and my happy face, and woke Olivia to start our day.

It was hard to concentrate on our lessons, hard to concentrate on writing, my mood was terribly low, and my body was buzzing like an addict in need of a hit.

I did not want Olivia to grow up in a strained, repressive atmosphere. I wracked my brain to think of something to do that could lighten the mood, something that was not watching Harry Potter, but something that Olivia would still like. An idea came to me, something that would take all day, and get us out of the house. Olivia was all for it.

We headed to Michael’s Arts and Crafts Supply in Bayview Village and bought card stock, glitter, paint markers, and thinline ink pens. She used this as an opportunity to get other art supplies she obviously had her eye on, but I didn’t mind. On the way home we picked up pizza from Little Caesar’s, with extra garlic sticks for Olivia. We spent the afternoon making owl themed handmade cards and didn’t finish until dinner time. We planned our deliveries for the weekend. She had a wonderful day which made me happy. I’d rescued her day from my misery.