by KUBOA
Months go by and I don’t think about her. But then the nightmares come and I wake up in my bed, sweatsoaked and ashamed.
I did love Kaye.
I want you to believe this, even if everything else seems like a lie.
If she ever looks back on our short five years together, she probably only sees me as a youthful mistake. A distraction. Nearly a tragedy. Maybe she’s convinced herself that she never actually loved me. Come to think of it, I’m sure of it.
But she did love me. I know she loved me.
Kaye romanticized my rebelliousness. She was so young, only sixteen when we met. I was almost twenty. I had already had my fill of drugs and insanity and hopelessness. I thought my wildest times were behind me.
She probably thought so too.
She probably thinks of me as someone too cruel to experience love, someone who couldn’t have possibly loved her. There’s a good chance that she thinks of me as a sociopath. And she would be right, at least in part.
And Kaye haunts me, defenseless as I dream, in the paralysis of sleep.
I once dreamed that she had a baby. I was the father but she was so ashamed of me that she never told me about the child. She wanted me to stay away. She wanted to pretend it never happened. But I found out somehow.
I was a shit. A total bastard. I admit this.
All I want is a little total absolution.
I’ll kneel and kiss her feet if I have to.
I’m asleep. Strange wires fizzle and pop underneath my bed as I toss about. I try to moan away the pain. There’s a connection being broken, meat being pulled apart, vibrations floating away.
I haven’t spoken to Kaye since I signed the divorce papers.
It was maybe a year after the divorce was official when my mother told me that Kaye had a new job working for a gardening magazine in Birmingham. I still had her e-mail address and I sent her a quick note of congratulations. A couple of days later, I got her reply:
“Please take me off your contact list.”
No, Kaye. Not yet.
A Casual Marriage
