LJ Idol Season 9, Week 24: The Cupertino Effect
It starts early -- so early, you’re not sure you can place when it started. You internalize. Accept. Obey. Repeat.
And repeat.
And repeat.
And repeat.
You repeat until you’re stuck, sitting at home with a wailing three year old who can’t tell you what it is that he needs. You repeat until you’re so angry, so depressed that you consider swallowing your wife’s medications -- and when you research whether this plan would even work, you’re disappointed to find that it probably wouldn’t. Not without the risk of recovering fully.
And you don’t want to recover.
There’s a fight, a perceived rejection, and hours spent crying, unable to sleep as your child wakes and wakes and wakes. The knives in the kitchen seem more inviting as the seconds tick by. The hypothetical gun your wife had always wanted feels so heavy in your empty hands. Her pills call to you, whispering that your son will be better off without you. That he won’t even remember you; he’s too young and infantile amnesia will kick in, erasing any memories of you and sparing him the pain.
It’s the thought of your wife that keeps you in the bed. How she’d fall apart without you -- how she needs you.
It’s enough.
For now.
***
She doesn’t need you.
No, she’s long since replaced you -- the words, “Emily has always been number one in my heart,” repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, enough to make your fingers shake as you reach for your wife’s proffered cigarette. She helps you light it, smirking all the while and murmuring at how she’s corrupted you, how she’s compromised your values.
(You hate smoking.)
One inhale. Then two. Then three.
It burns. It aches. And you’re not sure if the burning and the aching are coming from her words, or the smoke that’s filling your lungs -- but all you know is that you want it to go away. That you want her to come to her senses. That you want her, even if --
Even if you aren’t number one.
That anger that had almost wiped you out once before sits, ignited, rising in your chest and threatening to escape with each exhaled breath of smoke. Instead, you focus on how your whole body shakes -- on the soon-to-be-forgotten feel of her hands on your shoulders, nails digging in as she ordered you to hit her, to cut her, to -- to --
Another inhale of smoke, and you open your eyes to meet hers. “I am not going to throw you away,” you whisper. “I said I’d never abandon you.”
She laughs. “You will,” she says, avoiding your eyes as she speaks. “You only want me for sex, anyway -- and since I won’t let you have sex with me unless you rape me...” She walks over to you, her fingers brushing against your cheek before she pulls your half-finished cigarette from your lips. “And you’ll do it, too. Because I’ll make you my monster.”
And just like that, she robs the oxygen from the fire inside you.
You can’t become her Monster, after all.
***
She begs for forgiveness. She begs and pleads for you to stay.
You don’t know if you will, yet.
She’s back on her medications. She’s back to laughing, joking, clinging to you. She says she’ll go to therapy -- but at whose behest, yours or Emily’s, you don’t know.
You don’t know.
You don’t know.
A week passes. You spend one night in a hotel room, undecided and twisting, writhing with the weight of your decision.
If you stay... If you stay, will Friday happen again? Will she get worse -- will she wrap her hands around your throat, like you imagined her doing when she begged you to hurt her? Like you wrote about -- with Savin’s dead eyes and his long fingers tightening, threatening, all while Jazz stood and pleaded for him to stop -- trusting Savin just enough to know that maybe, just maybe, the threat was empty.
But, if you leave... If you leave, the marriage ends, and you abandon her.
And really, which is worse? The threat, or the broken promise?
As the clock strikes two on the second night of your hotel stay, you text her and ask her to meet you at the hotel. The two of you embrace outside in the parking lot, her eyes filling with tears as she waits for your answer.
“I’ll stay,” you whisper against her shoulder.
A week later, she tells you she’s leaving.
***
And so you become everything she claims you’ve always been -- just like her mother, always the martyr, always blaming her for everything. It’s her fault you’re so angry. Her fault your marriage failed. Her fault that you’re sitting here, staring at this email you need to send to your therapist, tweaking it, breathing it, hating it.
You have to send it. You can’t sit here, twisting in agony and telling yourself you can’t drive unless you have someone in the car with you. Because images of twisted metal and rumbled plastic and you -- caught up in it and in pain and broken and dead -- won’t go away.
So you don’t drive anywhere alone.
And that email sits, the cursor blinking and your eyes filling with tears as the anger fills you once again. All of her corrections. All of her words, pummeling you over and over. How you never put her first. How you scare her. How you need to change this. Change that. Stop being resentful. Stop breathing. Stop -- stop -- stop --
Your roommate emerges from his bedroom, all long, skinny legs and arms. He sits with you, wraps his arms around you, whispers something about it all being okay.
“No it won’t be,” you whimper against his chest, tears spilling over as your son jumps from couch to couch, all smiles and giggles and real.
He needs you. He needs you. He needs you.
“I --” You sniff, and his arms tighten around you. “I want to -- I don’t want...”
“I won’t if you won’t,” he says, understanding heavy in his voice. “Promise me that you won’t, alright?”
“I won’t.” And you finish the email, and hit send.
Dr. A’s voice is comforting when his call comes hours later, concern lacing his words as he asks, “Will you be safe to drive here, by yourself?”
“Yes,” you say, hugging your son closer to you and your grip tightening around your phone. “Someone’s expecting me.”
You hope it isn’t a lie.
***
It isn’t.
And slowly, life picks itself back up. Your son’s slated to start preschool. Sarah visits. Evelyn visits Emily.
August trudges forward, its days stumbling over the oppressive heat of summer. Your car threatens to overheat, and you need to keep air moving over the engine. Need to keep the car moving, need it to survive just a little longer.
And then it happens.
You don’t remember what day it was, or why you were in the car, but your son is with you, quietly kicking the back of your seat. He’s with you. He’s with you.
And it’s too hot -- far too hot, with the heat on to help trick the engine into thinking its just a little cooler. To make it last just a little longer. You take a side-road, thinking that the late-afternoon rush will be a little better there.
It's not.
You eventually pull over to the shoulder and drive down a gravel road to help pull more air over the engine. Just three miles from home.
Most fatal accidents happen within five miles of the destination.
You shake your head, brush the thought aside. Turn the car around, attempt to reenter traffic.
You don’t see the truck until it’s too late -- too late, too late. Its tires rip off part of your bumper. Mangle the rest of it and the headlight. And all you can think is: my son’s in the car, my son’s in the car, my son’s in the car.
“Minor damage,” the calmer part of you says to the other driver. “I have my son in the car, and it doesn’t have AC. I can’t wait for the police to show up.”
So the two of you part ways, shake hands. It hits you about a mile away from home: if you had pulled out another foot or two more, it wouldn’t have been the bumper. Shaking, you make it home without further incident. Send Evelyn a text, showing the damage, with a brief apology.
What the fuck did you do?
The text glares at you, the heat of her accusatory tone radiating up your fingers. I got into an accident, you start to explain.
And then she calls.
“You better have gotten the other guy’s information,” she growls on the other end. “I swear to god, Alicia, if you just fucking left the scene --”
“I had Bob in the car -- and the car was overheating --!”
But it’s not enough.
“That doesn’t fucking matter, Alicia. Now I have to fucking pay for this, too.”
It's never going to be enough.
“Because, as always, you were fucking irresponsible, and now I have to clean up your fucking mess.”
And neither are you.
And repeat.
And repeat.
And repeat.
You repeat until you’re stuck, sitting at home with a wailing three year old who can’t tell you what it is that he needs. You repeat until you’re so angry, so depressed that you consider swallowing your wife’s medications -- and when you research whether this plan would even work, you’re disappointed to find that it probably wouldn’t. Not without the risk of recovering fully.
And you don’t want to recover.
There’s a fight, a perceived rejection, and hours spent crying, unable to sleep as your child wakes and wakes and wakes. The knives in the kitchen seem more inviting as the seconds tick by. The hypothetical gun your wife had always wanted feels so heavy in your empty hands. Her pills call to you, whispering that your son will be better off without you. That he won’t even remember you; he’s too young and infantile amnesia will kick in, erasing any memories of you and sparing him the pain.
It’s the thought of your wife that keeps you in the bed. How she’d fall apart without you -- how she needs you.
It’s enough.
For now.
***
She doesn’t need you.
No, she’s long since replaced you -- the words, “Emily has always been number one in my heart,” repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat, enough to make your fingers shake as you reach for your wife’s proffered cigarette. She helps you light it, smirking all the while and murmuring at how she’s corrupted you, how she’s compromised your values.
(You hate smoking.)
One inhale. Then two. Then three.
It burns. It aches. And you’re not sure if the burning and the aching are coming from her words, or the smoke that’s filling your lungs -- but all you know is that you want it to go away. That you want her to come to her senses. That you want her, even if --
Even if you aren’t number one.
That anger that had almost wiped you out once before sits, ignited, rising in your chest and threatening to escape with each exhaled breath of smoke. Instead, you focus on how your whole body shakes -- on the soon-to-be-forgotten feel of her hands on your shoulders, nails digging in as she ordered you to hit her, to cut her, to -- to --
Another inhale of smoke, and you open your eyes to meet hers. “I am not going to throw you away,” you whisper. “I said I’d never abandon you.”
She laughs. “You will,” she says, avoiding your eyes as she speaks. “You only want me for sex, anyway -- and since I won’t let you have sex with me unless you rape me...” She walks over to you, her fingers brushing against your cheek before she pulls your half-finished cigarette from your lips. “And you’ll do it, too. Because I’ll make you my monster.”
And just like that, she robs the oxygen from the fire inside you.
You can’t become her Monster, after all.
***
She begs for forgiveness. She begs and pleads for you to stay.
You don’t know if you will, yet.
She’s back on her medications. She’s back to laughing, joking, clinging to you. She says she’ll go to therapy -- but at whose behest, yours or Emily’s, you don’t know.
You don’t know.
You don’t know.
A week passes. You spend one night in a hotel room, undecided and twisting, writhing with the weight of your decision.
If you stay... If you stay, will Friday happen again? Will she get worse -- will she wrap her hands around your throat, like you imagined her doing when she begged you to hurt her? Like you wrote about -- with Savin’s dead eyes and his long fingers tightening, threatening, all while Jazz stood and pleaded for him to stop -- trusting Savin just enough to know that maybe, just maybe, the threat was empty.
But, if you leave... If you leave, the marriage ends, and you abandon her.
And really, which is worse? The threat, or the broken promise?
As the clock strikes two on the second night of your hotel stay, you text her and ask her to meet you at the hotel. The two of you embrace outside in the parking lot, her eyes filling with tears as she waits for your answer.
“I’ll stay,” you whisper against her shoulder.
A week later, she tells you she’s leaving.
***
And so you become everything she claims you’ve always been -- just like her mother, always the martyr, always blaming her for everything. It’s her fault you’re so angry. Her fault your marriage failed. Her fault that you’re sitting here, staring at this email you need to send to your therapist, tweaking it, breathing it, hating it.
You have to send it. You can’t sit here, twisting in agony and telling yourself you can’t drive unless you have someone in the car with you. Because images of twisted metal and rumbled plastic and you -- caught up in it and in pain and broken and dead -- won’t go away.
So you don’t drive anywhere alone.
And that email sits, the cursor blinking and your eyes filling with tears as the anger fills you once again. All of her corrections. All of her words, pummeling you over and over. How you never put her first. How you scare her. How you need to change this. Change that. Stop being resentful. Stop breathing. Stop -- stop -- stop --
Your roommate emerges from his bedroom, all long, skinny legs and arms. He sits with you, wraps his arms around you, whispers something about it all being okay.
“No it won’t be,” you whimper against his chest, tears spilling over as your son jumps from couch to couch, all smiles and giggles and real.
He needs you. He needs you. He needs you.
“I --” You sniff, and his arms tighten around you. “I want to -- I don’t want...”
“I won’t if you won’t,” he says, understanding heavy in his voice. “Promise me that you won’t, alright?”
“I won’t.” And you finish the email, and hit send.
Dr. A’s voice is comforting when his call comes hours later, concern lacing his words as he asks, “Will you be safe to drive here, by yourself?”
“Yes,” you say, hugging your son closer to you and your grip tightening around your phone. “Someone’s expecting me.”
You hope it isn’t a lie.
***
It isn’t.
And slowly, life picks itself back up. Your son’s slated to start preschool. Sarah visits. Evelyn visits Emily.
August trudges forward, its days stumbling over the oppressive heat of summer. Your car threatens to overheat, and you need to keep air moving over the engine. Need to keep the car moving, need it to survive just a little longer.
And then it happens.
You don’t remember what day it was, or why you were in the car, but your son is with you, quietly kicking the back of your seat. He’s with you. He’s with you.
And it’s too hot -- far too hot, with the heat on to help trick the engine into thinking its just a little cooler. To make it last just a little longer. You take a side-road, thinking that the late-afternoon rush will be a little better there.
It's not.
You eventually pull over to the shoulder and drive down a gravel road to help pull more air over the engine. Just three miles from home.
Most fatal accidents happen within five miles of the destination.
You shake your head, brush the thought aside. Turn the car around, attempt to reenter traffic.
You don’t see the truck until it’s too late -- too late, too late. Its tires rip off part of your bumper. Mangle the rest of it and the headlight. And all you can think is: my son’s in the car, my son’s in the car, my son’s in the car.
“Minor damage,” the calmer part of you says to the other driver. “I have my son in the car, and it doesn’t have AC. I can’t wait for the police to show up.”
So the two of you part ways, shake hands. It hits you about a mile away from home: if you had pulled out another foot or two more, it wouldn’t have been the bumper. Shaking, you make it home without further incident. Send Evelyn a text, showing the damage, with a brief apology.
What the fuck did you do?
The text glares at you, the heat of her accusatory tone radiating up your fingers. I got into an accident, you start to explain.
And then she calls.
“You better have gotten the other guy’s information,” she growls on the other end. “I swear to god, Alicia, if you just fucking left the scene --”
“I had Bob in the car -- and the car was overheating --!”
But it’s not enough.
“That doesn’t fucking matter, Alicia. Now I have to fucking pay for this, too.”
It's never going to be enough.
“Because, as always, you were fucking irresponsible, and now I have to clean up your fucking mess.”
And neither are you.