i. denial
I was thirty. He was thirty-six.
I was wrong to think the second year of widowhood would be easier.
No one wants to ask how he died.
People assume I won’t be able to talk about it (I can), so instead we talk about The Bachelor, the most underrated sociological experiment of my generation.
I wonder if I could find love on The Bachelor, but realize I am too fat to apply.
If I stood before the mansion in a strapless sequin gown with my arm outstretched, viewers would focus on the soft curve of dimpled flesh hanging from my arm instead of the rose. So, I watch fabricated love stories with uncomplicated men under Tahitian waterfalls, and wonder if I did it all wrong the first time.
As I stretch out in bed, the drama from the TV flickers over my thighs.
I am tired of grieving.
I am tired, in general.
During commercial breaks, I google images of pugs on my phone. Pugs capture my fancy because they snort like Boston Terriers, and I miss my late husband’s Boston snoring next to me every night.
I miss my husband’s snores too.
Pugs have infinitely more fat rolls than contestants on The Bachelor. I’d like to extend a rose to a porky, black Pug and watch him tear up the red petals with his wrinkly face.
But I can’t bury another dog.
I am tired of burying things.
ii. anger
People get too excited about tomatoes.
My mom always says, “There’s nothin’ better than a ‘mater sandwich!”
I can think of a lot of things better than a tomato sandwich.
A nap is better than a tomato sandwich.
A good book is better than a tomato sandwich.
Sex is better than a tomato sandwich.
My late husband despised the tomatoes in Texas. No flavor. I’d carry him one home from the store, a firm red ball shiny with wax. On the counter, it seemed pretty enough for a still life painting, but as he cut, the inside of it melted away into slimy semen tinged with blood and dotted with seeds.
And folks wonder why I don’t like tomatoes.
They often ask if I’m angry with him.
When I found a bloody syringe on the bathroom floor the week before he died, I raised my fist at him and screamed until my cheeks flushed red.
He trembled in the shower, water shooting from the faucet. Hit me . . . please. There’s nothing you can do that would be worse than how I already feel for what I’m doing to you. Hit me.
Nine years earlier, we bickered over picking a restaurant and I popped him on the shoulder harder than I meant to. He grew serious. Don’t do that. Don’t ever hit me.
I slapped the bathroom wall instead. The flat of my palm stung red.
The syringe stared at us from the floor. Its needle pierced through the soft white folds of the rustled-up bathmat.
I had never been so angry.
My late husband tried to grow tomatoes in Texas, like he had in the other states we lived in -- places where the sky didn’t feel like a hair dryer blowing on your face. He packed moist, dark soil into terracotta pots. The black smudges lingered around his fingernails.
The western sun devoured his plants. The vines shriveled and cried, twisting away from the white plastic stakes they were tied to. They turned brown as they retreated back into themselves.
Then, like everything, they died.
iii. bargaining
With scientific studies linking intelligence to depression, I’m not shocked my husband died first.
If I were stupid, I might have better dreams. The dreams are the second worst part about all of this.
Do you want to know the worst part?
In the initial dreams, he still lived in the night with his warm smile and thick arms around me.
But I kept waking up.
I thought losing him again every morning would be as bad as it got.
It wasn’t.
I dreamt:
He faked his death to have an affair.
We divorced, and he immediately remarried.
In a loop he held the needle, and I watched him overdose hundreds of times, his body near death, slumped down with his head rolled over before he regained consciousness and sat straight up, only to inject again.
I moved away to a secret location, and he kept trying to find me.
He screamed that it was all my fault. I smashed everything stable in our relationship and drove him to madness with unreasonable expectations. I believed him.
The worst part?
On the night he died, a detective labeled our house a crime scene. I sat in the front yard with the crisis counselor and a cop, and behind me my husband rolled down the uneven walkway zipped in a bag on a squeaky gurney.
I couldn’t turn around to watch him go, and it was not a dream.
iv. depression
I paint my nails in bold colors –- sending a message for strangers to interpret.
Dark red shows I am respectable, mature and accomplished. I bought a house all on my own. I strut into work meetings with manicured fingers gripping hot paper cups of Chai Tea.
Tangerine shows I’m flirty and fun! No one checks in on me when I stay out till last call on a Tuesday night, sliding my brightly painted fingers down narrow cocktail glasses dripping with the heat of the stifling, summer moon.
Black shows I am mysterious as all get out. I sit on my back porch, watching lighting bugs with my black nails wrapped around a cigarette and don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with my life as I smoke under the starless sky.
Most days, my nails are black.
The only time I contemplated suicide was after I had to put down his Boston Terrier. Her brain deteriorated, but she wouldn’t die on her own. I cooked her a last meal of bacon wrapped filet mignon; seared to a medium rare and served on the china given from our wedding.
The next morning, the vet lowered his syringe into the bulging vein in her tiny forearm, and her neck rolled back limp against my chest. Her head, resting on my breast, was unreasonably heavy.
The small body of a black and white dog, smushy face covered in silver hair, grew cold on the metallic table. The vet said I could spend as much time with her as I wanted, but there was nothing to spend time with.
It’s called euthanasia, but it feels like killing.
That afternoon I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my thoughts circling around with the fan:
Everything we love, leaves.
Our brains betray us in the end.
Death holds more kindness than life.
When I die, I will be just another cold body on a metallic table.
I don’t remember what color my nails were painted.
v. acceptance
It’s 2:25 in the morning, and I am making out with the Republican in my car parked off Rainey Street.
I decide it’s okay to sleep with the Republican, because he’s not voting for Donald Trump (I checked).
Wonder how things might go?
Before he comes over, I will take care to hide the large wedding picture I keep on my dresser, placing the silver frame engraved with “Lauren & Tim” face down in my underwear drawer.
I will need him to leave when he falls asleep after, but my polite attempts to wake him won’t work.
I will be suffocated by his need to be close to me.
I will inch further and further to the edge of the bed until I hang off the side, staring at a red pen that fell on my dark hardwood floor.
I will feel guilty for hiding the wedding picture.
I will turn on the TV to watch The Bachelor, hoping it might wake him up.
Three of the contestants will fall in love.
I will just fall.
When the Republican eventually wakes from his extended nap, he will turn to me groggily, “I guess I should leave and let you get a good night’s sleep.”
I will not make up a polite excuse. I will say, “Yes – you should leave.”
But, for now, we are just making out in the front seat of my car.
There is no sex and no suffocating, just a sense of wildness pushing up and out of me, and a fierce desire to chase an unknown.
The Republican plunges his hand into the V of my dress, cupping my breast in his sweaty palm.
I let him.
He pulls away from my mouth and turns his face, breathily whispering into my ear before kissing my neck, “I want you.”
I place my hand on the curve of his shoulder blade and tilt my chin up, looking out past the windshield into the flickering streetlight in the dusty parking lot.
You can’t have me.
I lean into the stranger in my front seat. I bury myself.
Lauren Mauldin holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of California Riverside, and recently finished a memoir about losing her husband to opioid addiction. She has been published at the Los Angeles Times, Mud Season Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. Lauren lives in Austin, Texas and posts too many pictures of her dog on Instagram at @laurenumauldin.
Photo by dan.boss on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA