I ducked into the 7-Eleven near my place. There was no fried chicken with tartar sauce in the rows of bento, so I headed to the FamilyMart a few blocks away. They had what I was looking for. The cashier warmed it up for me. I got home and went straight to my computer, where I sat consuming my chicken while I wrote in my blog all the obnoxious things the group leader said to me. I worked the strangling feeling inside me into words. As I wrote, I recalled the sound of Mr S’s voice, the way my arm was fidgeting while I listened: So going forwards, let’s remember, you’re on our side, not the customer’s side, you feel sympathetic, I get it, but we have to present a united front, so if you could remember that going forwards, that’d be great…
But even writing out what S said in as much detail as I could bear to and then uploading it didn’t alleviate the squeeze on my guts one bit. If anything it made me feel worse, like my body was on the verge of spasms, and I was getting more and more frantic.
And that’s when the scroll bar finally reaches the bottom and goes no farther. Then, without warning, the screen switches to a totally new layout, bringing me to a whole different blog. I see the name of the author, but I can’t quite bring myself to process it, which is to say, I can’t write it here. But I know right away that it’s my husband’s blog.
As usual, I don’t know what to do with my body.
From what I read in his blog, it seems that the foul odour I worried I gave off that time but wasn’t sure was real was real after all. My husband found the stench so shocking that at first he didn’t even make the connection—he smelt it, but he didn’t really acknowledge it, not immediately anyway, until he finally started to get where it was coming from, which was when he looked straight at me, but being unsure whether to yell at me or be worried for me, he just sat there and said nothing.
He was completely dumbstruck. He wrote, what is she, part skunk?
Of course he’s never smelt a real skunk. But once when he was a boy he took his dog to the vet for an injection, and it wasn’t the first time the dog had gotten an injection, so it knew something painful was about to happen, and as it stood there on the vet’s exam table, it let out this truly noxious gas, which the vet said was the same type of reaction a skunk has, so you could say my husband has at least smelt something skunk-like before. The odour I was giving off must have been the same kind of thing, he wrote.
The larger of the two circular fluorescent bulbs in the light hanging from the ceiling is dead. It’s been dead for more than a week but we haven’t replaced it.
I’m bored with lying around here on my futon, I’ve been bored for a while now. But I know that when my husband takes the train home tonight, one of the last trains if not the last, my body will still be sprawled out on the mattress. I might even be asleep, deaf to the sound of him coming in. I can always sleep, and when I’m asleep I can sleep on and on.
But if I am awake, I might come right out and tell him that I blew off work and stayed in bed all day. Definitely not because I’m holding myself to a high standard of righteous honesty, and I would probably come right out and say it to anyone, it wouldn’t have to be my husband, although he’s the only person I’ve got, but I would say it because I want to put him in a bad mood. I have a deep need for someone to let me hurt them, I want to pull my husband down here to my level, where I’m wallowing, to be with me and to stay with me, to feel exactly what I’m feeling, I want to take these chunks of negative shit that I’m carrying around like rock candy crammed into my head and body, like bad junk that needs to be thrown away, and I want to pass them on to him, even though I’m not sure they can be passed on, I want to give him as much as I can, even a tiny bit would be enough.
But if I come right out and say to him I didn’t do a worthwhile thing all day, I can’t picture him giving me the reaction that I want, like making a face that shows how fed up he is. I’d be happy if he made any face at all, whether or not I could tell what it meant. I need a reaction from him more than anything else, but he doesn’t seem to grasp that. Why can’t he give any of himself to me?
The bottom of my ribcage is having a shoving match with the floor, the impact only slightly absorbed by the futon and the meat around my bones.
My husband thinks that it’s a good thing to be indulgent with me, he thinks that it’s a way to be kind, and he’s completely blind to the fact that all it does is make me feel worse about what a narrow-minded, petty, lazy bitch I am. I don’t need him to be kind to me or tolerant of how I behave. He’s never picked up on the fact that this is a change he needs to make. I’ve tried to make that clear to him again and again. But he always seems to think that his way is right, he’s never tried to change, never tried to see it from my perspective, not in
