"It’s the stupid little things that I remember fondest. Like how every morning when I’d wake up and get out of bed she’d have managed to liberate one perfect pink foot from the sheets. Every morning. Until she got sick. That’s how I could tell she wasn’t sleeping well. I wouldn’t feel her toss and turn or anything; I’m a pretty heavy sleeper, but she’d have both feet under the covers when I woke up. I don’t know if her feet were colder after she got sick or if she just didn’t sleep soundly enough to fall into that habit again, but there it was: disappointment. Without the foot, without the light brush of fingers it always coaxed from me, her lips wouldn’t curl slightly at the edges into her infinitely gracious smile as she slept.
“So I lived without it; she lived without it. Our days suddenly less exceptional, though she never knew it, our world marginally less bright. I never asked her about it, but I always wondered. That’s the way things go when someone gets sick like that. You stop having interesting, spontaneous conversations. Instead of your dialogues starting with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if such and such,” they start with, “I was thinking while you were gone,” or “I was meaning to ask such and such earlier, but you were asleep.” They’re more mundane as well. Instead of philosophy and the human condition or what not, you start to talk about what sort of food she’d like you to buy next time you go out or what temperature to keep the thermostat at so she doesn’t get warm when the sun hits her bed in the late afternoon.
“Everything reminds you that she’s going to die, and you’ll have to live without her. So you read more or watch more TV, anything to keep from dwelling on her worsening condition, but then you realize you’re avoiding her and you hope she hasn’t noticed while you privately plan to spend more time with her tomorrow, but you won’t. You think about what it’ll be like when she’s gone, if you’ll get over her, and despite your best efforts it occurs to you that life will be easier once she’s gone, and you begin to hate yourself for entertaining such a horrible thought because you don’t want life to be easier if it means living without her. She’s still beautiful, she’s still the same wonderful girl that invited you up to her apartment even though she hated the movie you took her to on that perfect rainy night in September. And she still lets you fuck her, in fact, she still seems to enjoy it and you’re thankful for that, even though you secretly hate that it really matters that much to you." She colors slightly in a way I’ve seen many women do. I always wonder if that’s what people mean when they say “blush” because I’d grown up thinking that “blushing” meant getting significantly redder than this, like a sunburn, but I’ve yet to see someone meet my over-inflated expectations. Maybe I’m just not as embarrassing as I think. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” she says. "That’s what we’re here for. You do have a wonderful way with words. Have you thought of maybe writing about your experiences? You said you want to be a writer, right?"
"Why? So people going through the same thing will avoid it and people who have never dealt with it can experience it intentionally? No thanks." She smiles through a sad little empathetic nod. I remember how counselling is really just paying someone to let me talk at them, and consider that writing a book would be an infinitely more profitable cathartic exercise. I always figured I’d try science fiction; that I’d write some palatable nonsense set in a different world, probably out of spite and loathing for this one.
I’ve pinpointed the exact moment that led me to this psychiatric cauterization. She hated to be called Jenny, absolutely hated it. Jennifer or Jen were fine, but Jenny she hated. So, of course, being antagonistic, I would occasionally call her Jenny in fun, but it never, not once, went as I hoped. She was sort of self-conscious about her dislike of the name to the point that she accused me of belittling her and thinking her silly. It doesn’t sound serious, and it never was really, but it never came off as the jest I intended it to be. I called her Jenny maybe five or six times in the first two years we were married, each time expecting her to, this time, recognize it as a joke.
Anyway, after she got sick, I never tried again. I guess the joke was no longer worth the risk of upsetting her. But one day near the end we were watching some TV show and she muted it on a commercial and turned to me, pulling herself to the side of the bed with the railing. She looked at me for a moment and when I smiled at her she said, ‘You don’t call me Jenny anymore.’ Confused, my smile faltered and I said, ‘You don’t like it.’ She casually wrapped her arm around the railing and gave me a genuine attempt at a smile with more sadness and longing in her eyes than I’d ever seen and said simply, ‘I know.’ It struck me almost physically then that I had failed her, by treating her for the last year as my dying wife rather than the center of a wonderful, if doomed, universe.
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