Wasteland. in And The Rest.

I can’t understand why you don’t want this for me.

For everything else between us that may not be perfect, I never suspected your sneaking snipers; stealing stealthy steps into my no-man’s land and snapping snippy shrapnel potshots at the hands reaching hesitant from hidden hollows. I never suspected for a second that you wouldn’t support me.

I get home from my appointment at midday; and you’re drunk, again, of course. Green-plastic cider-bottle corpses drained to discarded detritus, obscuring the floor and your speech sloppy as rice pudding at the edges; saliva-spilling around the slackened corners of your mouth, a drivel dribble of slurred words. Unscrewing the plastic cap of your ninth, and the questions froth forth with the same sussurant hiss as the gas from the bottle.

Where was I, what was I doing, who was I seeing, where was I, what was I doingandwhowasIseeing; alcohol repeats itself and runs your words together, a fermented elision, your sluggish eyes and torpid tongue already weaving stories of suspicion, of secret seedy encounters and urgent illicit abortions. I’m not ready, I didn’t want this conversation yet but it’s already here, it arrived uninvited and inebriated.

I didn’t tell you I was getting help, for a lot of reasons. Because my cautiously balanced, carefully-crafted no-man’s land, the paper-thin space between the warring-faction fractions of my mind, isn’t big enough for other people. It’s all eggshells and icepools and newborn faltering footfalls, it isn’t strong enough; I’m not strong enough. Because I am afraid of failure, and failure under the eyeball scrutiny of others, far more so. Because I am afraid of success, of trying to fit myself into a foreign body; because I am afraid, full stop, and I hate for that to be seen. Because I didn’t want you to know where I’ve been the last few months; swinging my legs over cliff-faces in pre-dawn darkness, staring into the puddled lights of passing cars from motorway bridges, building chemical doorways in my daydreams, stockpiling exit strategies. Because I didn’t want you to think that you weren’t enough, that you alone should have been able to pour cool oil over the raging acid waters of my mind. Because I didn’t want to hurt you.

But the persistence of intoxication; you won’t leave it alone. Part of me can’t believe you never saw the barbed-wire in my eyes or the screaming clutching hands ripping out my heart or the railroads of ruin running tracks down my arms; perhaps I am a better actress than I thought. So I tell you. Perhaps I think you might almost be proud of me, I actually thought I had done the right thing; a tiny candlelight-spark of misplaced pride flickers somewhere inside me, until you stamp on it with unforseen hostility. Until you smear clumsy drunken fingers into the fragile foundations of a potential new reality, grinding frail flimsy fantasy-futures into flattened ash.

What the fuck are doing that for? What do you think they’re going to do for you? You’re on fucking medication? You’re not going to take it, are you? You don’t need that shit. Why are you talking to these morons? Why don’t you just talk to me? You’re not going back, are you? You’re fucking fine, what’s with all this bullshit?

Maybe you wanted to ride in alone, a knackered white knight on a tattered trojan horse, and save me, solo, from myself. Maybe you are afraid that without the weight of my demons I could fly; and could fly away from you. Maybe you can’t face the idea of me trying to tackle my problems while you wallow in yours; they line the table like cider-bottle sentinels and are silently spoken in your sour beer-battered breath. Maybe you are afraid that your issues became our issues, and then bled into my own; and with our sex life nothing but offal and entrails on the abattoir floor, you are worried that if I talk too much the therapist will start poking painfully sharp sticks into that bruised and bloodied mess. Maybe you are just hurt that I didn’t say it straight away, lashing out half-baked and blind.

It was never my intention for our marriage to be the civilian casualty caught in the crossfire; collateral damage in a war that was only ever an internal affair, contained within the walls of my own city limits. This is why I don’t talk; share things that you shouldn’t and landmines explode through the floorboards underfoot, everything gets hurt and the walking wounded leave bloody blackened trails in their wake. I just thought, I just wished for a moment, that perhaps I could be something more than I am; I thought you might want that for me.

I can’t understand why you don’t.

Everything is a wasteland today; a waste of time, a waste of space, a waste of breath.

You are always wasted, and I just want to waste away.