May 31
SarahSlays.com
I keep dreaming about the forest. I dream I’m running in the cold darkness as the trees reach down and try to snatch me up into their hungry mouths. I run and run. And all I can think is, I’ve got to find a way out. I’ve got to get home. I’ve got to get home.
Then the realization hits me like a fist to the jaw. And I finally stop running.
I don’t have a home. I’ve never had a home. There’s nowhere to run. And there’s nowhere to go.
I stand in the darkness, lost in the deepest part of the forest, and it doesn’t even matter, does it?
I’ve always been lost.
I hit delete on everything I just wrote and nod encouragingly at my second-to-last client for the day. I have no idea what the hell Mrs. Reid is saying. Her husband, a slight man with sad eyes, didn’t show today fortheir second appointment. I scribbled useless notes for a few minutes before giving up. I zoned out but kept my eyes on the bridge of her nose. And I saw the forest. I’ve been dreaming of it every night.
She’s mid-fifties with over-plucked eyebrows and an air of genuine sadness. Our last session together revealed the usual bland problems of a twenty-year marriage. Trust issues, poor communication. Not enough intimacy. It’s fixable, but I don’t want it to be. It only highlights my own glaring failures. I want to sabotage this poor woman’s happiness because I’m miserable as hell and I want someone to drown with me.
Joe finally got in late Sunday afternoon. I didn’t confront him. I’m not ready for that yet. I also didn’t bother going downstairs for the rest of the day, and he never once checked on me. By Sunday night I was stuffed full of rage and cold pizza, pacing the room, hoping he could hear the creaking floorboards. Hoping he’d knock on my door and deny the affair.
This morning he left early for work, and I glared at the couch where he sleeps. I picked up each pillow and sniffed them carefully, wondering if I could smellheron him. That’s who he’s made me. A pillow-sniffing crazy woman.
Damn him.
Mrs. Reid continues her word-salad marathon, and all I want to do is throw up a careless hand and roar out,Look, love, your marriage is over. Mine too. Fancy a glass of red?
Then Mrs. Reid and I will throw ourselves on the rug and chain-smoke until my manager fires my unstable ass. I half smile, thinking it all over. Mrs. Reid will prop herself on an unsteady elbow, brush the ash-blond hair from her eyes, and ask me questions nobody’s bothered asking in years.
How’d you meet your husband?
I see myself taking a long, dramatic drag of the cigarette, then blowing the smoke softly toward the ceiling.I stole him from someone.
She raises her tiny eyebrows, nudges me hard in the ribs.Do tell!
I inhale again, long and deep until my lungs are close to bursting. Finally, I exhale.My sister,I tell her.I stole Joe from my sister.
Mrs. Reid flinches, squints at me like she’s seeing a monster.Why?
Disgust clogs her voice. She edges away from me, sits up, and brushes herself off. She blamesme,obviously. So did everyone else in our stifling hometown. That was why Joe and I left. Partly, anyway. Word of my betrayal spread hot and quick, and for the first time in my life, people were looking at me. Glaring and muttering loudly when I stood in line at the general store I’d been going to since I was a child. Old Mrs. Avery from next door actually marched up to me when I was hopping into my car. She wrenched the door open, thrust her head in, and yelled at me with a mouth full of yellowing teeth, “You’re disgusting, you know that? What you’ve done to your sister…” She shook her head like she couldn’t even get the words out and looked at me like I was an insect. “Joe was a good boy until you came along.” I stared at the steering wheel, not breathing. I felt sick. “He’ll figure you out soon enough.” She slammed the door, left me shaking.
My sister used to take Mrs. Avery’s bins up to her door every Monday morning. Nobody ever asked her to do that. But that was my sister, looking out for everyone. And when she started dating Joe, our elderly neighbors squinted at them like they wanted to commit them forever to their fading memories. Like they were the only good things in a world full of evil. My pretty, chatty sister and Joe, the football star with the smooth hair and kind eyes. Such a nice young man. Such a nice couple.
Until I came along and stole the fucker.
Immediately after, my sister stopped leaving our shared room, and Mum doubled her drinking and watched my sister fade. I started driving to parking lots after work. I’d kill the engine and sit there with a straight back, staring ahead at nothing. When it was safe and dark, I’d drive home, ready with an excuse about where I’d been, but nobody ever asked.
Then it got worse, and wehadto leave. Joe and I stuffed my thirteen-year-old Nissan with our clothes and fled the town in darkness. I didn’t drum my hands on the wheel and scream my freedom song out the open window. I didn’t feel free. I felt like I was fleeing a crime scene. We drovein absolute silence. I looked over at the weeping blond boy in my passenger seat, but he wouldn’t look back.
Later, we dyed his hair black in a shitty truck-stop bathroom with flickering overhead lights. He stared at himself in the mirror and wept so hard his shoulders shook. I said nothing. I stared down at my hands, stained black from the dye, and thought how fitting that was, considering all we’d done. The lives we’d ruined.
It was me who insisted that we marry. I thought it would help us. Thought we could rebuild. Turns out, we couldn’t. I asked him once why he married me, and he shrugged like I’d asked him what he wanted for dinner. Then, in a voice crammed with regret, he said, “I dunno, to be honest.”
I dunno.For fuck’s sake, he couldn’t have cut me deeper.
I rub my eyes and jot down some half-hearted notes as Mrs. Reid continues bitching about her husband. God, I’m tired. Last night I stayed awake again until 2a.m., looking for Darren Foster. I’ve found twenty-three Darren Fosters on Instagram so far and sent an identical DM to each:
Hi there!
You wouldn’t happen to know an Amanda by any chance? She owned a black Labrador called Winter. I’d love to interview her for my website! Thanks SO much!
