A Different Kind of Defeat

Tick, tick, tick. The handle on our kitchen clock keeps drudging forward, almost as if taunting me. I tear my eyes away and sigh as I look back down to my half-eaten dinner of roast chicken and rice. Micheal was supposed to be home from work at 5:30, it is now 6:15 and the dinner I cooked for us is cold. He's late with no text or call; I would honestly accept a letter via carrier pigeon at this point. I wish I could say I am surprised by his lateness, or that this is something out of the ordinary, a one-time thing, if you will. But as much as I hate to admit it, this is now my normal. I was never the type of girl who put up with this kind of shit, staring at a clock waiting for a guy to give her the time of day. Then again, I suppose Micheal was never the type of guy to keep a girl waiting on him. It had all been so good once, so perfect, straight out of a fairytale. What had happened to us? I look around the kitchen I spent painstaking hours decorating and find no answer, so I peel myself up off the mahogany chair and go to wash my plate, accepting defeat once again. As I finish up the dishes, I faintly hear the familiar sound of his car pulling into our driveway. The engine cuts and I take a deep breath as I turn towards the door, preparing myself for battle.

These are always the longest moments, not the ones where I'm waiting for him to get home with food fresh on the table, but the few seconds it takes him to walk from his car to inside our front door. The handle turns and he walks in, workbag on his shoulder and tie loosened. I didn't plan on starting a fight, I really didn't, but when he walks in and looks at me with barely an ounce of recognition like we haven't been together for five years like I'm not his fucking fiancé, the anger swirling around inside me takes root. Glancing at the clock and then back at him, now with his back turned hanging up his bag I snap, "6:27" is all I say, a bit more venom lacing the words than I intended. I see his shoulders visibly slump as he turns back towards me and shrugs. Actually shrugs. "I don't know what you want me to say, work ran late" Micheal huffs at me. After staring at him for a beat too long I get out, "5:30, that's when you said you would be home" he cocks his head "Like I said" he slows down his words, "work ran late." I'm already fuming and him talking to me like I'm three years old doesn't help. "You know there's such thing as an iPhone, something specifically designed for these types of occasions when you need to, I don't know, let someone know you are running late!" He looks at me like I just announced I have two heads and says "I'm not doing this with you right now Lacy" and then breezes by me into the kitchen so coldly I swear the temperature in our house drops about 10 degrees.

You could cut the tension in the room with a knife, and here I am stupidly blinking at the spot he just was. I don't know what to do, I could scream, cry, throw up, fucking stab myself in the leg and I have a guttural feeling that none of it would matter. Not to him, not to this stranger that I'm living with. It's hard to pinpoint the part where it all went wrong but all I know now is that it isn't working, round peg square hole and all that. I should've forced him to go to couples therapy when we still had a fighting chance. When our relationship was more than tense conversation and months with no sex. But now I can't even begin to imagine how to repair the mess splayed in front of me. I turn back around to see that Micheal had moved to the microwave and was in the middle of reheating the cold dinner I had waiting for him. Not knowing what else to do I slide into one of our dining table chairs and silently wait for him to sit down and eat. When he finally sits down neither of us speaks for what feels like forever as he starts to eat. At last, I get up the courage to ask, "Why?" it comes out as a whisper "Why is it like this between us?" He looks up from his food, his chocolate brown eyes staring into what seems to be my soul "I don't know" he admits as he looks away from me like my stare has burned him. Maybe it has, maybe over time we've burned each other time and time again until our relationship is something unrecognizable. "What do we do?" I ask, "I don't know," he says yet again and each word feels like a knife to my chest. I stare down at the ring taunting me from my left hand that he got me a year earlier. I remember being so happy when he proposed, yet now, I feel nothing, something that was supposed to mean forever somehow ceased to mean nothing a year later, how does that happen? That's not a question I ask out loud, but rather something I let myself think about quietly. I look back up and see Micheal watching me silently, not with love but with something else entirely, it almost looks like indifference.

Mustering up the last bit of courage I have, I spit the dreaded words out "This isn't working, is it". With a sigh that sounds too much like relief, he says the words I never wanted to hear, to admit, "I know." I don't cry, I don't scream, a part of me has known the words he spoke for a while now, but still, something cracks in my chest at the realization that something important has now come to an end. My shoulders sag as I finally accept what is so clearly in front of me. Looking up I stare at the clock once again as it beats to its own steady rhythm, tick, tick, tick.