Reminiscence

(Trigger Warnings: Swearing, mental health, self-harm, and suicide.)

I’m sorry, Allison.

The memory washes over you as cold water stings your freshly scrubbed cheeks:

You and James watching reruns of Lost in your Brooklyn apartment. Picking up on his tenseness all night, even after trying to settle his mood with a bottle of red. Him pausing the episode in the middle of the protagonist’s heated confrontation and telling you he has something serious to talk about. You watching his fingers tease the remote’s pause button, as if begging him to hit play, smile, and let the moment pass. Him setting the remote down beside you on the couch, as if begging you to pick it up and erase the coming moment before it could enter the world and begin its rot. As if you should have known. As if you must have been blind not to have seen this coming. Your inability to string together the words that fell out of his mouth before he opened it was just indication that you didn’t care about your marriage. Indication of your fault in this problem. Your equal fault and responsibility to make things right.

As you slide your fingers across the slick porcelain of your bathroom sink, guiding the soapy residue of your morning routine into the drain, you recognize the presence of the same silence which engulfed the air on that last night you’d spent together. You had cut into the emptiness with the piercing projection of your sharp laugh and blurted out a witty response you thought was sharp enough to expose your husband’s dimples and give away his joke. James’ expression remained unchanged though. The strong black lines of his brows knit into a convoluted point at the center of his forehead, and the sight of his brows strangling each other pulled you into a different memory: James resting his head on your thighs as you massaged the muscles in his face, teasing him that he had more wrinkles than the trophy wives who came to you to get them lasered off. I don’t have to worry about my spouse leaving me over a fine line, he said before flipping himself to be underneath you. Is that so? You giggled while riding up the hem of his shirt and dipping your mouth to meet his. That memory, one you used to fantasize about to get through long days at the office, tastes foul now, and its irony still burns as it did when you studied the tense expression on your husband’s face. It was true, you would never leave him over a fine line. It would take a line that speaks something truly disfigured, something truly vile to do you in.

We can just forget about this and start over.

He was wrong, of course. When your husband sleeps with a pretty, younger woman he met at a bar after work, you will never forget it. You could certainly forgive him. After years of therapy to patch up the newly developed insecurities and trust issues that sprung into existence with your husband’s infidelity, you could prove yourself strong or stupid enough to re-scrapbook the broken pieces of your relationship. You could pray for the spirit of forgiveness to bless your partnership and move your cowardly heart into giving grace to the ones who’ve wronged you. You could be proud of your resilience and the challenges you overcame together. Together, you’d say when your girlfriends would ask you how you ever got over his cheating, we got through it together.

Still, for as much forgiveness as you’re willing to dole out, you’ll never forget it. The little voice you’d come to call the devil or doubt will always stick with you, no matter how many times you try to stuff it away. When he turns away from you in the middle of the night, when he smiles at the waitress serving you on your anniversary, when he meets your future daughter-in-law—the voice will reappear, resurfacing that first blow of betrayal. You would have been wise to listen to that voice before tethering it to an anchor to sink into the deepest pit of your subconscious. It was never the voice of evil swimming up to the surface of your mind. It was reason.

How much easier things would have been if that was what had happened instead. If James had taken out the pain of what he thought was your devastatingly mundane partnership on a few rounds of Smirnoff and a hotel room with a college girl looking to bring home a story. You wouldn’t have cared if your closest friends had seen them out together, his hand slung around hers, her body swaying against his in a cramped club. You wouldn’t have cared about the whispers, the pitiful looks, the shoulder squeezes. If you were given the chance to jump back in time, you would appear to your husband as a premonition and tell him to fuck literally anyone else before he fucked Betty.

When your husband fucks a stranger, your world collapses and leaves you alone to decide whether to build back the ruins. When your husband fucks your sister, your world dies. It leaves no choice; Forgiving and forgetting become obsolete. You are left with only the death of what has passed, and the death that is to come.

This doesn’t have to be painful.

Here, he was half right because, for you, this won’t be painful. Life cooped up in the apartment that once vibrated with the radiance that was James and Allison was the absolute peak of agony. You could never escape the reminders of him, of the life you once had, which flowed from every inch of the 900 square feet that confined your torture. You’ve spent the last six months in solitary confinement with nothing else to do but replay the past. James implied that there were signs you had missed, clues that could have saved your marriage if you had acted on them sooner, and you’ve tried everything to find them. But after sending a search committee into every crevasse of your mind, you’ve still come up empty-handed.

His words manipulated you, replaced the foundations of your brain’s once highly-regarded logical reasoning with paranoia and fear. You’ve let him control you, take away your agency as he did when he chose to replace your body with your sister’s. You despise how he’s ruined you. Yet even so, the warm memories of him still caress your legs in the middle of the night, hug your waist as you reheat frozen noodles on the stove, whisper warmly on your neck, calling you to let him back in. The space you had occupied in the months after you threw him out, the space in between hating him and loving him, was the deepest color of cruelty. Everything after, everything here as you walk down the familiar streets of Park Slope, is relief. At least for you, it soon will be.

Please, baby, don’t leave us.

Before everything unraveled, Betty was a great older sister. Your parents used to joke about how close you were, chalking up your sisterhood to the mental tricks they played on you when you were kids. Where’s your baby, Betty Boo? Your mother cooed behind the camera of the home video still etched into your mind. Your parents read hundreds of parental advice columns and learned that referring to the younger child as the older child’s “baby” could offset early sibling jealousy and competition. It worked for too short a while. In the recording, five-year-old Betty dashed from the screen before returning with your flailing two-year-old body in her arms. My baby! My baby! Betty cheered, tossing you up until your cheek grazed the camera’s lens, which picked up the absolute horror sketched over your face. But you didn’t stay in frame for long; You were never the star, Betty was. The video ends with you lying sideways on the grass, your sister having just dropped you, and your mother pictured in the frame preparing herself to soothe your upcoming wails. The camera flips and rests on Betty's face, her mouth twisted in what would become her signature smize. Back then, it was only the toothless grin of an attention-hungry preschooler.

You spot them sitting at your favorite table long before you make it into the restaurant. Through the tall, wide windows of Café La Marzia, you get a clear look at the pair. James’ drooped posture ages him a few years since you last saw him, and Betty’s face is even paler than what her icy-blue undertones usually allow. They’re speaking in hushed tones, probably whispering in wonder at why you asked them to meet you today. James is leaning over the circular café table you used to cherish sitting at. It’s funny how things come back around. You played and replayed your memories over and over, searching for any indication that if somewhere in the past, on one of the countless trio breakfasts you’d shared with your husband and sister, you had missed a stolen glance between them, a touch of their knees, a brush of their elbows. These just weren’t things you were actively looking for before you began scrutinizing every moment the three of you had spent together. But you must have missed something, or you wouldn’t be seeing your ex-husband, the man you’d loved more than you loved yourself most days, smiling at your sister in the way he is now. In a way that is tender and intimate, erasing the until you’re the only two souls left in it. He’s smiling at her in the way that he used to only smile at you.

You break their shared moment with the abrupt jingle of the café’s doorbells upon your entrance. They both hop out of their chairs, and you want to laugh at the guilt slapped on their faces. Standing with their arms by their sides, completely motionless, they look like two teenagers caught in the act by their parents. As you edge closer, their expressions morph into something more convoluted. Betty’s eyebrows inch into her hairline while James’ brows collide into the knot you remember too well. If you wanted to, you could read their faces in a thousand ways—shock? worry? disgust?—as they pick up on your decay. You know you’ve lost weight, a pack of instant ramen a day isn’t enough to sustain your once-athletic body, and you haven’t been going outside, so your color might have gotten cooler than your sister’s for the first time. But you don’t analyze their expressions. What they think now doesn’t matter anymore. It won’t matter to you for a very long time.

Taking your seat at the round table, you finally meet the gazes of your ex-husband and sister. They look simultaneously confused and confusing. Betty’s bright blonde hair is cut to her chin, signaling that she’s had too much on her mind to be taking care of her usually blown-out locks, and you have to stop yourself from counting the grays peeking out of James’ scalp. He’s done a poor job of covering them up, and they stand out like a headband running across his hairline. Perhaps the topic of hair maintenance had brought them together in the first place. It almost makes you happy, seeing their otherwise perfect appearances defaced by what must have been their fears about your well-being. Seeing that they still might care about you, after all they've done, almost makes you feel something again. Almost, but not quite enough to untangle the strings of fate you’ve already sewn yourself into.

Without a word passing between your table, you ruffle through your bag to pull out the water bottle you’ve prefilled with half water, half murky liquid you purchased from the hooded man on the corner of West Third. In one fluid motion, you tip the bottle to your lips and chug, taking two short gulps to get the concoction down. Painless, the man promised, but it wouldn’t matter anyway. You could have swallowed boiling gasoline and still feel as light as you do now. Setting the bottle on the table, you take in the open mouths and squinted eyes of the pair seated before you. It’s excellent, for the first time in a long time, to be in control.

As your brain begins to swim you sense the faint touch of a hand grabbing yours before a voice bellows across the room for someone to call a medic. Your eyes roll into your head and you feel the urgent need to vomit. Stronger hands grab your shoulders and begin to shake your body. You are two years old again, weightless and freely flailing around in your sister's arms. My baby! My baby! A familiar voice calls, loud yet distant, and you can’t help but smile.