~Elli~
The silhouette of his back is breathtaking, everything I adore about my husband in a single dark shadow. With his position facing away from me he doesn’t see the tears that pour from my eyes. The skin on my cheeks feels hot and raw with every tear that silently tracks over them. My bright blue eyes feel dull and achy, no doubt swollen and red. My husband chooses to turn a blind eye to my tears, my anguish and desperation. Just as his back is turned now, he has left me completely alone in our relationship. A figurative shun, a literal hell. I know he doesn’t know me anymore, and I think what hurts the most is that I no longer know him either.
“Garrett, baby please just talk to me. I can help you. I know I can,” my plea whispering across my lips, falling on deaf ears. More tears threatening to blur my vision, only serving to irritate me. Each drop of water making me feel increasingly vulnerable and weak.
He doesn’t turn toward me, my words just hanging in the air between us, he just shakes his head slowly from side to side with the utmost control. This robotic person in front of me is not the man I married. This thing in front of me isn’t my best friend, isn’t the one I vowed to love until death do us part. My heart constricts painfully while I realize some type of death has already parted us.
“G,” I pause, walking toward him. “Please look at me.” To anyone else, the anguish in my voice would be heart breaking, but not to him. He likely doesn’t even recognize it being there at all. I watch his shoulders tense at the use of my nickname for him. Ever so deliberately he turns my way, each small movement making me feel hopeful that he’ll come to me. Each achingly slow inch making me want to believe he might look at me with love again and not this distant coldness that’s become our new normal.
He completes the turn, and I’m left feeling worse than when I couldn’t see his face at all. I see now that I was foolish to hope, foolish to think he would look at me with anything more than contempt. What I wasn’t the slightest bit prepared for was the look of hatred, so cold, so sharp that I feel it carving my heart out. What I see in those grey eyes breaks what’s left of my heart, the pieces shattering on the floor, mimicking shards of broken glass.
“What do you want from me, Elli?” he growls in a tone that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I want to answer him but it’s too hard now. I wanted him to face me and talk to me like we aren’t two strangers living in the same space. But I can’t. I physically can’t. The way he said my name wasn’t loving, wasn’t the way a husband should ever say his wife’s name. It sounded like a curse, something you spit out quickly because if you don’t, it’ll leave a bad taste in your mouth. My silence must piss him off, his back tensing further. But then again, everything I do lately pisses him off.
“ANSWER ME ELLI AVERY, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” His voice is a shotgun to my heart, filling my chest with lead bullets that leave me open and bleeding. He never talks to me like this, he never yells at me. Who is this man? I wrap my arms around my middle, hoping that if I squeeze myself hard enough I won’t fall apart right there in our bedroom.
I hiccup, “I just, I just want to help you.” The tears clog my throat, they blind me and blur the image of Garrett in front of me, distorting him so I can no longer see the man I love. Was he even here to begin with? My rushing tears reveal a shadowy version of the monster he’s become. I hear his frustrated breath turn from a sigh to a curse and realize I don’t know how to live like this anymore. I look down at my feet, clutching my sides so hard that my fingers ache, the pieces of me slipping through my embrace. His footfalls come closer and it frightens me. I shouldn’t be afraid of him. I wouldn’t have been before, but it’s so different now. I sense his presence before I physically feel his touch. His hands brush against my arms so tenderly, such a contrast to how he was just treating me, that I flinch He runs them up to my neck where he uses the pads of his thumbs to stroke my throat, something he knows used to soothe me while also setting me on fire. His hands on me, his fingers caressing me so gently, it’s too much and I feel myself breaking further. I don’t know how to handle what’s happening right now, hot and cold, back and forth. He leans down pressing his lips against my temple and I completely lose it. The first sob comes out as a hiccup and I let myself go from there, feeling every ounce of hurt coming from a dark place within. Just the simplicity of his touch unravels every single piece of me.
“I’m so sorry, baby, I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he whispers against my hair, “and that’s why you can’t help me. I…don’t even know how to help me.” His voice slices through me the way he sounds so raw, so broken, so desperate to let me in while not knowing how. He pulls me hard to his chest and I can barely breathe, his scent surrounds me, comforting me while simultaneously terrifying me. What if we can’t get through this? What if he pushes me so far away I never get him back? I wrap my small arms around him and hold on for dear life, feeling like this might be the last time he ever holds me this close.
“Don’t cry, baby, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he whimpers into my hair, his lips peppering kisses over and over. I know in my heart he isn’t okay. I know in my heart that my husband is drifting away from me bit by bit and it’s killing me. It’s killing us. The war inside me is so loud that it drowns out his apologies, they become background noise instead of something tangible I can forgive. So, I do the only thing I can in this moment and hold him close, unable to even think, even hope, even breathe.
He moves us to lie down on the bed, me curling up into his side with his strong arms locked around me. He acts as if I’m the one trying to leave him when it’s the other way around. I force my mind to shut down and focus only on memorizing his touch the way his muscled arms hold me tight into his side. The way his breathing is evening out, a sick façade of calm washing over us. I can feel his shoulders slowly losing their familiar tension, his arms instead flexing around me, keeping me tucked into him, where I used to feel safe and wanted. I miss him. He’s right next to me and I miss him as if he were still in Afghanistan. I let my body finally give into the exhaustion, feeding on his warmth and drift away. The ear resting over Garrett’s heart listens to it beating steady and loud, lulling me into a false sense of security.
I’m having a dream so vivid about the day we married, that I could almost feel the sand on the beach, almost taste the salt in the air from the ocean when suddenly I’m flipped on my back with his hands around my throat. I scrape my nails against his forearms trying to get him to loosen his grip, using my whole body to try and buck him off of me. His eyes are so dark they’re almost black and I know he isn’t with me right now, he’s back there, in Afghanistan, in combat. He presses me further into the mattress, this big man straddling me and slowly choking the life out of me. Pinpricks of tingling start from my fingertips and work slowly up my arms and I know I’m losing this battle. I struggle with everything I have, trying to get him to let up, but my arms feel foreign and heavy, the edges of my vision starting to blur. I barely feel my hands fall from where they were clawing at his arms, I barely recognize the fact that I can’t see him anymore because my vision is so far gone. The only thought I can conjure is that my husband is killing me and he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. I let myself give in to it, feeling almost that if I give up now I don’t have to hurt anymore, I don’t have to pretend. My body starts shutting itself down, the lack of oxygen finally becoming too much for it to take. As I start to drift away from life and a warm light beckons to me from a distance, the air returns. It’s so strange that at first, I forget how to take it in. I start coughing and sputtering, taking in a big lungful of air and feeling my body come crashing back to this reality. This moment where I almost died at the hands of the man who claims to love me. I take in deep breath after deep breath and run my fingers gingerly over the welts his hands left on my throat. It hurts, but not nearly as much as my heart does. .
I can barely see him from where he’s hiding in the shadows of our room but I hear him over my desperate gasping, his voice coming out low and broken, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.”