Bumbling

“Don’t be such a sourpuss,” he said before taking her with the enthusiasm of a eunuch as the morning sky pissed down in thunderous torrents.

She watched his face as he hovered above her barely moving in breathless boredom, before rolling her eyes back and closing them in mock ecstasy. Emotions washed over in repugnant gobs as she waited for him to give up the mighty battle he was losing, roll off her and back to his side of the bed.

They lay side by side with the silence of hampered dreams slamming against the drywall in angry bursts.

“Sorry,” he said lighting up a cigarette, “didn’t mean to be such a goof off.” He didn’t wait for a response or receive one as he blued the air with smoke in disgusted puffs. “So what’s it gonna be, you gonna whine, complain or will it be that old crowd pleaser, the silent treatment?” he asked.

She was somewhere else having removed herself from the situation and his words. But there were no green fields of rolling luxuriant hills. No flowing white chiffon dresses. No Fabio.

Not this time.

She had given herself a new dream. One she wouldn’t allow life, him or her own fears to fetter. She closed her eyes again and contentedly exhaled trouble and despair in joyous huffs.

I am somewhere far away from here. I am happy and I am loved. I do not know the landscape. I will create it as I go. I will walk where I choose, and I won’t look back.

He mistook the great sighs she was making as an attack on his manhood. Or some sort of attack. It didn’t matter.

“Why do you always have to make it worse than it already is? Come on snookums,” he said with the puppy-eyed innocence he’d found, thrown away and retrieved throughout his life. He gave her butt a not so gentle slap. When she didn’t respond in any way to his not so tender jostling he rolled back over fighting an unknown assailant, and losing. He smashed the elongated ash of his cigarette down grinding the red hot spark that peaked before dying.

He looked at his cufflink on the nightstand; the other had rolled under the bed when he’d happily removed them earlier that evening. He hated those forced affairs where everyone was expected to dress up and look happier than they actually were. He’d watched her that evening in prideful disgust as she posed and smiled with deadened eyes. He loved her. He’d made a vow to love her, at least that’s what he’d remembered saying or feeling or something else altogether not so long ago.

He reached for another cigarette, changed his mind and put it back in the pack. She’s probably thinking of that guy who was flirting with her half the night, he thought. He looked at her sleeping form wishing she was small enough to splat like a fly, and then shocked by this momentarily glimpse into his darker self stumbled out of bed and into the corner like an errant child. Then he slid down the wall returning to his former fetal self; to the time before too many smoke-filled, drunken days and nights had washed away all of the innocence his mother had desperately tried to hoard away.

“I am lost, so very lost,” he said not knowing or caring if she or God heard him.

*************************

She had no idea of his turmoil as she continued the journey she’d begun. Everything was there; just as she’d left it when she’d dreamed her first dream before a lifetime of new fresher dreams came and left, like forsaken and forsaking lovers. Only a few of them had passed from dream to conviction to reality. The rest had wandered off or been chased away by parents, friends, lovers and finally herself.

Marriage had been one of those dreams once. Funny, she thought, how easy it once seemed to list your dreams one-by-one thinking that all you had to do to make them happen was to check them off. Now she knew there were some dreams that were best left unfulfilled.

It hadn’t always been this way. There had been times before their day-to-day existence contained more than time spent waiting for the next verbal attack when they’d been genuinely happy and in love. At least that’s how it seemed.

They’d played the part too well. They both looked like Mr. and Mrs. Young and Happy and it had been a success until it came time to take off their masks and be truer versions of themselves.

She winced as the pleasure of her dream seeped out like air from a lonely balloon, and opened her eyes. “Why’d you do that?” she asked.

When he didn’t reply she sat up. “Where is he?” she said out loud covering her nakedness with the sheet and stumbling out of bed. Then she saw him, the heir apparent to some titled corner office cave who went to work each day looking perfect and pressed crouched in the corner like a punished child.

She wanted to tell him that she was tired of him and their life, that she had aborted everything she’d wanted for herself and sacrificed it to a fairytale.

He wanted to tell her that he thought they should breakup without delay and that he’d met someone else who didn’t bedevil him with expectations that made him feel like a fraud and a failure.

“You want some coffee?”

“Yeah.”