Tobias 

23rd of March 2017

It was quiet. It would always be quiet. A week had crawled by since she’d gone to her mothers. She had said she needed ‘space’. Space. What the fuck did she mean by space? Did she mean distance, because travelling two miles down the road didn’t particularly seem like space to me? Nor did the ‘I don’t know when I will be back’ time frame she’d wafted vaguely at me, as she slammed the door behind her; so, I’ve existed here for seven days, waiting for my own wife to decide whether the space she needed is indefinite. Space was so final, the last girl to tell me she needed space ejected herself out of my life five years ago, and she hadn’t looked back. Now the woman who had promised to share a life together with me, was following that repetitive path.

Space.

I was going insane coming home to our house knowing that at any given moment it could be referred to as only my house. Even the commute to London every day had ceased to be a relief, it meant two hours of the day was spent obsessing over the events that had led to this. Of course, we argued, but who doesn’t, that’s just the norm for couples. But to even comprehend that deeper problems were at play, was beyond what I perceived as my reality. I believed that we were as happy as we could be. Would be. That the place we were in was satisfactory enough to live out our lives together. The feelings had faded over the years, but that was marriage, it was bound to distance us. We aren’t children anymore, and that cupidesque stage of blissful romance, where your better half can do no wrong, and your love for them is nuclear, has undoubtedly ended through the stresses of jobs and mortgages. Yet that was to be expected. Wasn’t it?

My father had drilled into me from a young age, that marriages weren’t smooth sailing, and if my wife lived a content life and received everything that she wanted, then I’d done my job as her husband. I wasn’t moronic enough to believe that this was the gospel truth, holier than thou, to be followed biblically as a great teaching from the higher power, but I did understand that my father was somewhat relaying that good old proverb – ‘happy wife, happy life.’ – in his own distorted viewpoint. My father had been a single parent for as far as my memory reached, if I ever had a fleeting sense of who my mother had been, it had long dissipated from my mind and had joined the shelves of the ‘best left forgotten’ remnants of my subconscious. Which is why his unusual view of the proverb had always been taken with a pinch of salt. Despite his lack of feminine understanding, he had been for the most part, a caring and nurturing father, whom to the best of his ability had tried to raise me to be a gentleman future husband, which I had been.

Rosie had received everything that she had ever wanted; first she’d wanted me to like her, then she’d wanted me to date her, then she’d wanted me to propose. She wanted a big wedding, a costly wedding, a spectacle, a show. And she certainly had that, I felt like a tourist at my own wedding, not a necessity, just someone to write the check, and say ‘I do.’, had my father not passed and left me copious amounts of property, and a steady wealth accumulated from decades of safe investments, the wedding would have been all but a fantasy to her. But she wanted it, and I damn well gave her it. It hadn’t wiped me out, not even close to, but it left a large void out of my inheritance. All for her. all so that she could display ‘our love’ to the world. It was embarrassing to say the least. if it was her, I know that she would have hated such things.