The Girl with Horizontal Dreams

So the girl with horizontal dreams sat on a cold kitchen stool, looking out of the window at the wide expanse of  lively flora and fauna that seemed to mock her with its vivacity. She sat there, one missed call away from depression, one chipped fragment of her soul away from death. This is what it feels like to be happily married. She looked down at the white gold band around her frail left finger and felt nothing. Not even nostalgia, not longing, not the teary-eyed happiness she felt on her wedding day looking up at the stoic cross hanging on the brick wall behind the altar as if to say, “I am with you.”

She sighed and rose wearily, studiously avoiding the taunting ticking of the clock as it betrayed her daily fear, 10:15pm and he’s still not home.  This was a dangerous place to be in, this deep sense of failure and giving up for which apathy was too light of a descriptive word.  She ran her fingers over her dry messy bun, tendrils of hair sticking out in the back, and marveled in disbelief at the time when she dreamt to be his wife, two become one, until death do us part, Amen. She wandered through the comfortable desolation that was her family home, echoing with the footfalls of many a long-gone toddler. Her heart had ceased to bleed long ago. She had forced it to, for fear of her husband’s dismissal that only served to increase the pain rather than to alleviate it.

She had an endless inventory of things she could no longer say, what was the point? He would be back soon, take a quick cursory glance at her distressed face marked with valley-deep channels of her endless tears, and all he would do was shrug.  “If you don’t want to talk about it I’m not going to ask”.  She looked down at her dwindling frame and suddenly felt cold even in the perpetual 33-degree Ghanaian heat. How does infatuation, and passion, and lust and obsession, morph into flippant neglect, and uneasy comfort, and torturous nonchalance?

She had dreams, and although he never categorically forbade her from following them, she felt she had to stunt their trajectory, what was the point if she had neither his disapproval nor his praise? She used to yearn for everything that was him; a discarded handkerchief, a late night phone call, a smile; and so it didn’t matter that she let her ambitions cool on the countertop like a stale apple pie. Thinking back, she couldn’t even remember why she turned down that summer at the writing institute to spend time with him. He wouldn’t have said no, he didn’t even have the right to, but she thought he was worthy and so she gave him a full pass to her heart, her mind, her free will, her future.

And so her astronomical dreams were put to rest. Her life stretched out in front of her in an endless sea of company functions, and traditional weddings and lonely nights in the cold tundra of their four- poster bed. Her dreams for their life together died a thousand deaths at the first shrug of his shoulders. She slid into the icy bed sheets. 3:15am, he’s still not home.