Untouchable

Sensitive content warning: emotional domestic abuse and control.

I haven’t been touched in five years. I can’t remember what it feels like anymore. My life has become so robotic; it’s hard to tell what I’m feeling anymore. My husband told me he was a good man. That should have been the first cause for alarm bells, but I took him at his word. I trusted him from the minute we met, because why wouldn’t I? I had never met someone of his calibre before.

Coexistence is hard when someone dehumanises you daily. I walk into the same room as him at breakfast time. He gets up before me – to avoid me, I think. He makes himself toast and coffee and sits in his favourite chair. I’m not allowed to use it. I hear the crunch of his teeth on the toast and loud sips of coffee – the signal of the commencement of another bad day. There have been so many, they are innumerable. After taking his time over his breakfast, he gets up from his seat, leaving the cushions crushed and the seat misshapen from his substantial mass. I come downstairs like a dormouse, timid with every step. I don’t dare to make myself a noisy breakfast. I quietly prepare something to satiate my appetite and I sit on my own seat – hard and unforgiving – eating as quietly as I can muster. We don’t exchange a word throughout this entire performance. I glance at him, but only whenever he is looking elsewhere. He looks like an angered bull, ready to charge if I misspeak. I try to keep my distance, even though the last thing I need is distance. I crave human closeness, but not from him. He’s my prison guard, policing my cell, day and night. We do this daily dance, but it isn’t a joyful one. I used to like dancing, outside in the rain. I listened to my Walkman, whenever they were still in use, decades before my marriage. I used to walk barefoot in the grass of my garden, dancing to my own tune, feeling as free as a water lily. Not anymore. That person is a stranger to me now. Whenever I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t know who I am. I just know my face looks worn and exhausted. I barely have the will to repeat another day. That’s all it is: repetition. Each day is identical to the last, lacking the emotions that make a life worth living.

I set about my chores for the day. I have a mountain of laundry to do, and the place looks like a dumping ground even though I had it sparkling the previous day. I’m not allowed to get a regular job but that’s fine because I have a huge workload to get through each day anyway. I wouldn’t have a hope of getting it done if I had to go out to work too. I suppose he’s doing me a favour, in a twisted way. He goes out to work each day, as a builder. He comes home whenever he decides to. His work is usually followed by a trip to the pub. Sadly, he’s in a worse mood after he’s had a drink. But it’s the difference between six and half a dozen eggs, in the end of the day.

I scrub the life out of the floor, on my hands and knees. He says he wants to be able to see himself in it, and he does check. It’s strange though, because he is an incredibly untidy person and he systematically works his way around the house, undoing everything I’ve done after the inspection’s over.

He wasn’t always like this. He used to have a good heart, by appearances, at least. I can vaguely remember the way he wooed me. The flowers he gave me that turned to dust long ago, returning to the earth like I will at the end of this suffering-filled life. It’s all a distant dream, so far in the past that I can only recall pieces of the story. I like to tell myself that that person is still in that body. He’s just well hidden beneath the persona he likes to put on at home. If I stopped telling myself that narrative, I’d have to leave, and that’s too much to think about. I can’t even begin to think about how I would disentangle my life from his. We are enmeshed: in our finances, our home, our reliance on each other.

Sometimes whenever he is asleep, I get up after midnight and go and gaze at the stars and moon brightly glowing in the sky. They seem so far away but I can graze them with my fingertips through the window. It’s like I can almost touch a dream of something else, if only I had the bravery to step out from behind the glass. But that’s what frightens me: what if it’s an optical illusion? What if, on the other side of the glass, I find out that they’re unreachable and then it’s too late to turn back. I know if I ever dared to leave our home, the door would be forever locked to me. That’s why I never do. I don’t know how I would begin to live without him giving me my life force anyway. I don’t remember what I used to think before we met, when I had independent thought and I was incapable of looking after myself, or anything else. He has strengthened me, in a way, even if it’s been done by means of bullying, over the course of years, decades, a lifetime.

One day, I had to go out on my own, and he let me go. It was for a gynaecological examination. That kind of thing makes him uncomfortable. He told me to attend to my “female troubles” and then to hurry home. Whenever I walked into the doctor’s office, I felt naked without him by my side. I didn’t need to strip down to my underwear to feel that way. The nurse looked at me. She didn’t permit me to look away.

“Oh, love, you look like you need a good hug,” she said, and before I had time to protest, she wrapped me in her embrace. It felt weirdly foreign, uncomfortable, like acupuncture. I might have needed it, but I’d forgotten how to want it. After the appointment was over, I hurried home; back to the safety of being untouched.