This flash piece reminds us of the many ways we’ve all been “washed in loneliness.” A heartbreaking portrait of isolation and love, “A Closed Circuit” grapples with the question of what it means to desire and be desired.
— AM
My husband says I am out of love. He claims there is an empty space two fingers down my ribcage where love used to be. So he goes out with other women. When he returns: he cleans the house, puts on music, showers for long. His skin glows, his teeth shine. Sometimes my husband cries and talks in his sleep. I interlace my fingers with his and whisper, I understand. But he pulls away as if he can’t stand the vacuum that oozes out of me. Lying next to him I smell a woman I used to know but can’t recall her name. Was it Claire, Judy, Raina? Doesn’t matter, it makes me wild, it turns me on: this dream, a culmination of all the women he has loved. It fills the void, makes me giggle. My husband wakes up, presses his hand under my bust, feels the flutter and confesses he does it all for us: to feel this moment together.
Sometimes the dream rises like smoke from my husband’s cigarette, forms a funnel: a cone of faces revolving around him. Blondes, redheads and brunettes. Lost and beautiful. When my husband emerges, he looks brand new, a man ready to seduce again. He dyes his hair, wears contact lenses, and finds a different girl. Buys her expensive clothes and jewelry, slow dances with her until she cracks open like an egg, and spills her cravings in a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere. He brings her home. Together they watch movies, eat popcorn and fall asleep on the couch. I slip away, from the house into the streets and parks, washed in loneliness, sitting in my car, as the dusks flow into nights. My husband swears he never makes love to other women because he wants to stay loyal to me. Commitment is what we live for, he says. Eventually, the girl leaves him. Her scent, her longing to find true love, her wish to be remembered, all becomes a part of the dream.
The dream gets stronger, its grip tighter around our souls. A closed circuit.
My husband asserts he wants me to get better, to become a woman whose body is a large, beautiful bird: soft and accessible, whose heart explodes with love and understanding. The hope in his eyes makes me dizzy. I carve out cardboard wings, attach to my loose kaftan and flap in front of the mirror. I try to feel a movement in between my breath, a rush of color on my cheeks. Nothing. Usual rise and fall of my chest. Thump thump of my heart. The woman in the mirror raises an eyebrow at me. In the background, my husband winces.
Five weeks in a row, my husband gets red roses for the girl he is seeing. I soak in the warmth of their rich color that rises like a giant bubble and settles in the empty space inside me. I’m making progress, I exclaim but he doesn’t believe me. The dream is the cure, he says, running his fingers over a rosebud, tight and tender like a rolled tongue.
My husband takes a break between dating girls. Those nights are the hardest. I ask him about signs of love and his silence sweeps through me. As days go by, I feel less sure about who I am. He promises things will recover: one day, he’ll hold my hand for hours, paint my fingernails, massage my scalp, tongue-kiss between my legs, raise kids. The way he says this makes me believe it. Or want to.
Intermittently I worry if we’ll run out of girls, if my husband will no longer have the passion to fill my bareness. If I’ll never carry in my womb what I want to know about love, and pass it on. But he is always ready as if there is nothing else for him to do. As if finding another girl is as involuntary as his breathing. As if he needs the dream more than I do. As if I’m not the one out of love, I never was.
Image Credits: lunita lu
