I’m Sorry About Your Husband
Your husband made me mussels on my birthday. He gave me a Tom Robbins book, drank beer from the same spot my mouth touched, put a hand under my shirt at the bookstore in Sociology + Religion. I’m sorry for the things I wanted to do with him. I’m sorry I was 21 and thought you were the enemy because I didn’t understand what it was to meet a divorcée with a daughter and to have your own baby with him and to wait up nights while he’s teaching a stupid 21 year old how to play pool and what cum tastes like when you stand behind a restaurant fryer for 9 hours.
I met him at the tail end of a relationship I wanted to blink and be rid of, and he walked into the kitchen in combat boots and a bandana and a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tattoo. I licked his tongue in the walk-in and I’m sorry I ignored you when you came in to sit at the bar and I made Stephanie run your food instead because I couldn’t bear to look you in the eye on the chance you might see my mouth and realize who’d been in it.
I’m sorry for the moments I felt connected to you, realizing we are both women he’s chosen, realizing we are both probably better than the man we’ve fallen for. You and I, spirits across the bedroom, we’ve shared no airtime but both keep identical moments of (probably) watching this man read us poetry, and reading the poetry this man wrote for us. When he tucked a note into my locker, I’m sorry I blushed and ruined a pair of underwear like you didn’t even exist. I’m sorry for the hours you were written out of existence as your husband gripped my ass on the street while we walked to get coffee or brushed the snow off my car when we ended our shifts early.
His notes were hot and written on the backs of receipts and food order statements, and as they were written and as they were read you were not even a footnote – you were gone. You disappeared the second his ink hit paper – you disappeared the second he first winked at me from behind the expo line as I burned my fingers on hot lasagna.
We texted only for a while after he was fired, kept threatening to meet up and spit into one another’s mouths. We both grew weary. Without the expo line between us, without the heat of not touching then almost touching then secretly touching it was just a dirty old man with a 21 year old lesbian, each pretending we didn’t know we would get bored of one another the instant we went further than play. While I thought you weren’t in any of our moments you, maybe, were in them all – the real life that beckoned to him, the thing he was running from, the space between the words that was less allowing (less willing) than me.
And in his audacity I see you punishing yourself and I’m sorry you believe you deserve a man who thought he deserved women like us – I’m sorry that’s the life you live with, on a precipice of reluctance and agreement.
He stole a book I loaned him, a book about newlyweds on a beach grappling trauma and love. I wonder about that book more than I wonder about him, wonder if he keeps it on a shelf in your shared home, wonder if your son will grow up to read that book and find an old index card some girl wrote his dad some years ago, describing the shape of his pants and the funny way his left eyebrow has a scar. How many of the books were other girls’? How many of the books are yours?
If we’d fucked, this would be half as long, and I’d merely eek out the words of a woman who can look back on her time as a young girl needing so desperately to be seen that she sought the sight of a man with a wife who would no longer deign to love the whimsy of his cruel spirit. That we were all symptoms of the same cycle – any interest in me reflected a hatred towards you reflected a resentment towards him reflected a preternatural instinct for this kind of behavior towards girls like me.
I am sorry about your husband, and for all that he’s meant to me, meaning for all that he’s meant to you, meaning for all that you could be without him.
Tayler Bunge is a queer, adopted Chinese-American writer with work that’s appeared in McSweeney’s, Tenderness Lit, CNMN Mag, and others. She has an English & Philosophy degree from Regis University in Denver. She lives in Los Angeles and Philadelphia.