Tag: #dailychallenge

She was one of the girls from the model school in the university town. There were fewer than twenty of them, moving lockstep through twelve grades together. Most of them lived a protected existence. Middle class. Some upper-middle class. Doting parents. Somehow they thought they were special. It wasn’t their fault. It was instilled in them. She knows there is nothing special about her, although there was about many of the rest. They loved each other as sisters. She looks back at that time, at those girls, and wonders how any of them survived in the big, wide, still scary world.

She wonders if she has survived these many years later. She knows her ability to find and have a decent romantic relationship has not survived. That has been gone for a long time if it ever existed at all. It might have been killed one night when she was seventeen. She won’t think about that. Maybe it was killed when they divorced the first time. Perhaps when a love relationship during the gap between the two marriages hadn’t worked out?

What she knows for sure is that this time, this failure of her second marriage to him has done her in. It wasn’t that the marriage failed. It was the way it failed that has hurt her so much. Eventually, she’ll go through the motions of life again. She can’t even do that now. But one day she will. Even as she hopes there will be another relationship, she knows there won’t be. She will never open herself up to that kind of pain again. She can barely sustain her friendships right now. Even those seem to be destined to cause pain. She isn’t able to show her friends how much they mean to her anymore.

Maybe this is the way it was supposed to be all along.

There is a silence in her heart.

THE END

This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s #JusJoJan 2018 Challenge.

 

She had started to revolt against his jealousy years before. He was so jealous that she swore he was jealous of inanimate objects. She went into a career that was male-dominated. He was, of course, jealous of her colleagues and questioned her when she had to stay late at school. If he didn’t question her, he pouted. He was even jealous of her girlfriends. She seldom went anywhere with her girlfriends because she was basically a homebody, but when she did, he was convinced they saw “men” or met “men” or that they went out of their way to be around “men.” He was even jealous of the time she spent with her dogs. Her best friend was a man. Friend only, but of course, he never believed that.

She tried to talk to him about his jealousy. She reassured him. She certainly didn’t have to be with him. She had her own money, her own means. She was with him because she wanted to be and for other reasons as well. Nothing could ever reassure him and he took his jealousy out on her. She thought his jealousy caused him to start questioning her every move. Caused him eventually to start hating her. It was so unnecessary.

Then she found out about his former ten-year affair. She quit cajoling him, reassuring him. She didn’t care anymore. She came and went as she pleased. She didn’t answer his questions anymore. She didn’t let him persecute her over a lunch with a girlfriend or a phone call from her best friend. Perhaps that had been the beginning of the end. She doesn’t know. Divorce is usually caused by a lot of little things.

She had spent the early years of this nine year marriage trying, really trying. The harder she tried, the more he expected. The more jealousy surfaced. It just wasn’t meant to be. Why couldn’t he just be a man and confront her? Tell her face to face it wasn’t working? He did exactly what his father did to his mother. The same thing as going to store for a loaf of bread and never coming home.

Why did he have to be such a sneaky coward?

Why does that have to hurt so much?

 

This post is part of Linda G Hill’s #JusJoJan’s 2018 Challenge.

 

She was sitting at the dining room table, trying to make progress on her novel. She was in the middle of it, the hardest part. It was difficult to muster up any creativity  this year at her beautiful island. The tension between she and her husband was oppressive and it sucked at her soul. She was lost in thought about her marriage and her manuscript when she realized she heard voices out on the patio where he was working.

She stopped for a moment and listened. She realized it was a woman’s voice answering him when he spoke. She stood up, assuming it was either one of her friends or a neighbor who had come to visit. She went to the door and opened it to let them in. She was taken aback. There was a woman on the patio who she had never seen before. That, by itself, wasn’t so unusual where they lived. People stopped by a lot. That was one thing she liked about the island.

This woman was different and it only took her a moment to realize she was drunk. He was smiling at the woman and smirking at her. The woman saw her and said, “He told me you had curly hair too. Could you please help me with mine?”

She was stunned, but she walked out on the patio and introduced herself to the woman. She didn’t reciprocate.

“Could you help me fix my hair?” the woman said again, as her husband laughed in the background.

”I’m sorry, but I’m not a hairdresser,” she replied. The woman seemed to have already forgotten what she had asked and jabbered about why and how she came to the island. All the while, the woman kept reaching up, trying to touch her hair. She was conscious of neighbors walking by, walking their dogs, taking their daily walks. She felt the woman and her husband, who obviously knew each other, were trying to humiliate her.

She was repulsed and, suddenly, angry.

“Would you please leave?” she asked the woman. “You’re drunk.”

”Sure, honey,” she said, and walked over and hugged her husband.

She turned and walked into the house, feeling degraded and demeaned. She and her husband never spoke of it again. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

 

This post is part of Linda G. Hill’s JusJoJan 2018 Challenge. Prompt by Jim Adams