Darkest Before

[Trigger warnings: divorce, mental health.]

They say there is no rest for the wicked, but there doesn’t seem to be rest for anyone.

Vee feels this most when she is lying in bed after a long day of staring at a computer screen, the blankness of a dingy, maimed wall (flat paint is the worst), and into the eyes of her daughter. She is too young to understand; she is a toddler in every sense of the word, ambling from one part of the house to another, taking on greedy grips of the world, unaware of how fragile it has become.

The thought makes sleep harder. Vee stares into the popcorn ceilings, wishing she could fade into its jagged ridges piece by piece, but it would only confirm her husband’s grievances. That she is a thinker, not a doer. That she lives to avoid and escape hard situations instead of taking life by the reins and conquering it like the beast it is. That she rather wallow in self-doubt and take the easy way out. There is no darkest before dawn if you can’t last long enough under the shade of the moon to see it through. 

She struggles with how true this is, wonders how she can hold onto the hope of dawn even though each speck that creeps through the dilapidated slits of her spirit are promptly stamped out. Sometimes it’s just a reminder of how her husband says she’s smaller than him. She isn’t the woman he hoped she would become and that there are other women he’s connected with—not physically, but emotionally which is bad enough—that pique his interest more, that keep his fire fed and satiated. He says he held her up on a pedestal in the beginning, his eyes aglow with awe at her creativity, her mysteriousness. Perhaps his reverence was shortsighted, a rose-colored misfire disguised as admiration.

On the flip side, he blames himself. Back when they first met, she was new to this, and he coddled her, holding her hand along the way despite any deep-seated misgivings. She’d had crushes before and shared forms of intimacy with others, but he would be her first boyfriend, the first to lead her into territories unexplored. He loves her, he says, he will always love her, but he’s tired of playing guide. Long story short, being a shepherd is of no interest to him anymore.

The thought makes Vee laugh softly. It flutters into the dark air, fading into a realm inching closer and closer to midnight.

Couldn’t he have done this before the wedding? Before the baby, who's nearly two and in the most important stage of her life? Potty training and so many other things have to be done, but it's now that he decides to upheave everything. And it’s not as if he did everything, as if she told him to take on these things when he could have just let her swim. How can anyone expect reciprocation when you’re speaking in the wrong language?

Then another thought comes to mind: Who can blame him? No one likes dead weight, a person afraid of failure and who bides their time for so long the opportunities fade or escape them. Someone who only thinks is unattractive, particularly for him, a man who came from a woman who is a go-getter. Even his sister is that way, perfectly decisive, a paragon of action in the most unideal situations. When she first meets them, she feels deficient and unable to measure up to them, precursors to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The pillow becomes a pensive well and she digs deeper and deeper into her childhood. It was filled with a sort of strange love. A mother she knows loves her but has a difficult time expressing it, who is more adept at showing frustration, condemnation, and anger. Her father, long divorced from her mother, is easy-going, chill, and a charismatic talker with a wealth of worldly experiences—but he doesn’t know her. Deep down, at least. He’s a tad bit too distant to know, seemingly too busy with a Rolodex of acquaintances, friends, girlfriends, and her siblings from other relationships to cultivate a meaningful bond with her, one that would entail remembering to send a “Happy Birthday” message, whether it be the day of or at all. 

Vee remembers a time when she was a touchy-feely, words of affirmation type of person, but years of rejection and inadvertent mishandling seem to have buried that side of her. If it were there, her husband would not feel the way he does, mistreated, insecure, flighty, eager to seek attention, and ego boosts from women he barely knows.

As much as she wants to put the onus on her parents or on anyone who may have factored into how much she shrank herself, she knows it would be childish and unfair. It’s one thing to be hurt. How you handle it is another thing; at a certain point, she became the designated driver, so there’s only so much blame she can place at their feet before accountability stands over her shoulder and demands to be seen.

The queen-sized bed begins to morph into an allegorical grave. She forces her downward spiral toward deeper depths to a screeching halt, but she’s still in a zone occupied by the flames of torment.

Still, she does not want to sleep.

Perhaps she simply can’t. Anxiety and inferiority will not allow it. They sit with their legs on either side of her body, choking her within an inch of her life. 

Vee thinks about all of those silly advice columns on how to not feed the monster of self-doubt, but she’s seriously questioning how that’s possible when her other half tells her she’s an incomplete person. His respect for her seems limited to her duties as a mother. Though she would love to include “and”, she doesn’t think there’s much to the basic “admiration” one develops from a relationship of their longevity (nearly ten years). Something that small isn’t worth acknowledging or celebrating if the berth is mired with silent resentment and disgust. 

Even with that said, she, again, can’t blame him. Throughout the years, he’s let her know in the best way he can. Yes, sometimes it wasn’t entirely clear, at times it was just a word or a story or a look from across the room after a scene in a movie, a moment between family members, or a comment from a YouTube video. He would look at her or speak words saying this is the kind of thing I need from you. Admitting this doesn’t make things any less painful. 

That’s the thing about ambivalence. You can feel one way and also another. You can feel dirtied, wronged, and mistreated, but also see where the other party is coming from. They say you aren’t entirely to blame, but you feel you are anyway because how else do you handle your marriage catapulting itself off the ledge? It spent years teetering, and just when you start working on your grip, it slips from your fingers and falls into the darkness—to where? 

Vee doesn’t know. It’s the one thing she spends hours in bed thinking of, cloaked in darkness and the hum of her daughter’s sound machine. 

For a moment, she imagines she is a deckhand (because, if what her husband says is true, she has spent the entire time being led) and her marriage is a ship. A storm raging in the distance suddenly closes in, sending everything astray. The sails pitch, bow, and snap. She’s flipped from one end of the deck to another. Visibility is limited. She wouldn’t be able to see her husband, the captain, if she tried. Are they close to land? If they are, maybe there is a chance. 

She is sick to her stomach, tossed around so much everything seems hopeless, even as she closes her eyes and wills herself to sleep. She wants to escape this embarrassment, the yawning jaws of failure. 

And yet:

When the clouds clear, the waves settle, and she opens her eyes, she hopes the sun has risen to meet her. She hopes to see the ship. 

It doesn’t have to be whole, but she wants the pieces to be salvageable. She won't be the same, the carpenters would say, a crinkle to their brow, their fingers steepled in thought, but you can rebuild—with you both at the helm, steering as one.