[Flash Fiction] A Letter to My Imaginary Husband

snowmachine (64)in #story • 7 years ago

Dear baby, I’m thinking about becoming a murderer.

There’s not really a startup cost to becoming a murderer - it’s a hobby you can pick up using the ordinary objects around your home. Kitchen knives. Garden hoes. Bleach. Sponges. Plastic. That sheet of LSD I bought off the darkweb that you don’t know about. The neighbors haven’t mowed the lawn in a while, and their child keeps crying at 4 in the morning. And you know how bored I get around the house these days, taking care of the dogs and “writing” during the day.

Every morning when I wake up, I meditate for half an hour to clear my head. But these days on the exhale I can’t help the compulsive thought from drifting up: “Even serial killers are important for society.”

Okay, I don’t really want to become a murderer. I just wanted attention.

Which is a shame. Men like to measure your fuckability by your unavailability. The perfect woman sits on a balcony smoking cigarettes and looking pensively off into the distant. She never cries or loosens her corset. But I was never good at shutting up. I was never good at letting things just be.

I watch the tide come in and scoop up the water in my hands because I don’t want it to go back. I roam abandoned hospitals at night and I bang on the walls trying to wake up the ghosts.

I know that you’re thinking uncomfortable things about me, but I have a sick compulsion to ask what you’re thinking anyway. You’ll tell me “I’m just smoking a cigarette,” and I know that you really mean, “You’re making me miserable.”

I wrote myself into the code of your favorite game so that you’d spend more time with me. I put my poetry into the sky, and my words into the mouth of the NPC merchants in town. I follow you as you slay demons. I’m always there with you, but I’m beginning to learn that loneliness is a state of mind.

I complain that it’s always so dark in our house. It turned out I was roaming the hallways at night, unscrewing lightbulbs and pulling the curtains down.

I try to make a joke out of the miscarriage. I say things like, “He saw who his mother was going to be and decided to run for the exit.” Because the worst thing would be no talking about it. The worst thing would be to let it fester inside me, slowly killing me.

I mean, I just don’t know what else to do.

These days on the exhale I think, “It’s been thirty-six fucking years, by now you think you’d learn how to breathe.”

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Self portrait by me canon t51