I’ve been thinking about running away lately.
Now, at this moment, the situation that I am in is neither good nor bad, simply inconvenient. Inconvenient in the same way that stubbing your toe is, or trying to flick off some stubborn cigar ash, and accidentally burning a hole in your brand new white blazer.
The life I am living is nothing more than an inconvenience. The only thing stopping me from leaving right this moment is my own cowardice - and my sick wife, Marilyn.
It wasn’t cancer. It wasn’t hepatitis. It wasn’t pneumonia, tuberculosis, appendicitis, the flu, tetanus, AIDS; it wasn’t anything that they could identify.
She had been in and out of hospitals on a near constant basis for the past 18 months. X-rays, blood tests, urine tests, you name it, she’s done it. I’ve driven her to every hospital this side of the Mississippi, still with no answers.
Marilyn was never the most physically stable person. In the 13 years that she had been a part of my life, the amount of times she had gotten sick or injured far exceeds most of the people I know, but she stayed ravishingly beautiful, through sickness and health.
“Marilyn, if there’s anything I could do to make the world treat you right, i promise I’d do it in an instant.”
I said that over 7 years ago at our wedding, and I had never once broken that promise. Not when she started passing out at work, or when she stared vomiting in her sleep, or when she lost 35 pounds off her already slender frame, or when her skin started to more closely resemble sand paper than flesh. After all of that, I kept my promise.
I drove Marilyn to the doctor nearly weekly, some drives taking more than eight hours. She would lay in the back, with a bucket wedged in between the seats, next to her face incase she vomited. I gave her her medications, and ointments, and held her when she cried, even if she began to reek of rot.
I was never upset, or hurt, or lost. She just began to feel more like a chore than my wife. Simply an inconvenience.
I never got a break, or a pause, or a moment to relax.
Eventually I quit my job. That same night, the blood vessels in Marilyn’s eyes burst, leaving her scleras bright red. Lucky for us, the damage was mostly cosmetic, much like how most of her hair had fallen out.
It became quite hard to keep calling her by her name. Her once beautifully red lips had turned dry and purple. Her teeth began rotting and her tongue was so swollen it made it hard to breathe, so she spent most of her time slack-jawed and panting, like a dog. At this point, speaking became too hard for her. It didn’t matter what I said to her, she couldn’t respond or do anything. But her numerous brain scans had showed that her brain had not degraded at all. She remained the same mentally as her body began dissolving in front her eyes.
I began to see the Marilyn that I married and the Marilyn that I knew now as two separate people. Subtly, resentment grew. I loved Marilyn, but was disgusted by what she had become. She wasn’t Marilyn anymore, simply a thing.
As her health degraded, we no longer could take her to the doctor. We all knew she was going to die soon. I moved us both to a house in the woods, secluded from the world. I had isolated myself from my friends, my job, my family, and the world at large. I knew what I was going to do.
Marilyn was going to die soon, and so was I. She was my only responsibility left, and soon, when she croaked, I was going to go into the woods behind the house, and shoot myself. There was no point in living without the Marilyn I use to love.
One day, I had woken up, and went straight to the cot Marilyn slept on next to the bed. She was completely hairless, and her sandpaper skin was stark white. She was sleeping face down in a pool of vomit, her arms crossed under her chest.
I smiled to myself, absolutely sure she was dead. I put my hands on her skeletal back, trying to feel for a heartbeat, and there was none.
I rolled her over, she stunk like death, shit, and vomit, but that wasn’t anything new. My eyes drifted to her face.
She peered directly at me, eyes moving wildly. She was still alive.
I scanned down her face.
Something was very wrong.
Where her mouth was, the perfect red lips that i had kissed so many times - or rather the thin, purple, crusty lips that had never touched mine; there was nothing more than one small, eraser sized hole, leaking vomit. There was no semblance of lips, it looked like her skin had grown over the opening of her mouth.
I looked further down, seeing her arms fused to her chest, her hands looked more like bony mittens than fingers, the separation between them no longer existing. Her feet were the same way, each individual bone was visually but her toes were melded together.
For the first time, I had broken my vows. I ran out of the house and into the woods