For the next few weeks I am going to do a series of stories. For some reason stories are all that are coming when I sit down to write so I decided to follow them. I noticed a theme and decided to make a short story series of them.
The Guest Room
She paced back and forth in the guest room. She had had enough. It wasn’t a fight with screaming and the digging up of old hurts that had sparked her anger, instead it was him sitting on the couch watching TV as she got ready to go. He was supposed to go with her as she hiked along the lake on the anniversary of her mother’s death but somehow he talked his way out of it with a smile and a joke. ….this was nothing new. He said he was too behind at work to just stop what he was doing and head off into the woods. He knew it was important to her but she finally saw clearly that what was more important was himself – his own needs and wants no matter how small. When faced with the seemingly simple choice of doing something small and important to her or satisfy his own selfish desires he would always chose his own.
In this tiny moment in the guest room she realized all of his shortcomings, all of his once endearing traits all seemed to conspire day after day to frustrate, exhaust and finally anger her. She had spent years using food, a glass of wine, or a forced smile with an assertion that he ‘meant well’ to get her through another day, but it worked no longer. There was a distance inside her now, one that could not be bridged. What could she do, she always told herself, this was the guy she married. The thing was he didn’t hit her, wasn’t a drunk or a liar, didn’t demand she behave like a 50’s housewife; he was much more subtle than that. She had never seen it until today and now she realized he was like water on stones. He wore her out by consistent, constant pressure. What seemed like a placid river on top was actually rubbing away on stone and dirt below - scraping its way through. She had wanted to travel, to visit her daughters more, to take day trips and see plays but at the end of the day she would end up next to him on the couch watching a movie he had probably already seen.
She thought of the newspaper article about a section of the river people in town loved to swim at during the summer months. Every year 4 or 5 people would be confused by the rivers seemingly shallow calmness and before they knew it found themselves pulled under by the current and swept away. She walked across the floor to the table, looked in the mirror and she saw it. There was a valley cut through the center of her. She had never noticed it before, perhaps she had felt it from time to time but she always assumed it was just a case of the blues or melancholy but now there was no denying it’s presence…no denying its depth. She felt her chest and it felt wet…damp. He had run through her like he ran through everything else in his life and now years had been washed away like silt. She looked at the wrinkles on her face, the deep canyons across her forehead and cheek. She wiped her tears, put on some fresh lip stick as she heard his voice calling her. She was like a leaf that had been caught in an eddy for a few moments, she was calm and still but then a pull and she was gone.
