“You’re doing it again.”
“Ermmm ...what did you say?” Clinton asked, readjusting himself.
My voice took a bitter tone. “I said you’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?” He asked even though, with the way he fidgeted, most likely knew what I was talking about.
“You have that light in your eyes again. That light that says you wish to be anywhere but here. That light in your eye when you think of another time and how life could have been different. A light of regrets. Regretting me.” I whispered that last part, hating how my voice broke in the end.
“Karen...” he said, as he made his way to me, but I shifted. Away from him and his touch.
“Don’t Clinton. Just don’t.” I let out a huff and stalked like a wounded animal to my room. At the door, I paused and turned to see that he his eyes were still trained at me. I smiled but then I looked closer and saw that he wasn’t really looking at me. The light had already returned to his eyes and my already broken heart broke a little more. With a final sigh, I went into my room and shut the door resoundingly behind me.
Curled in a foetal position on my bed, I let the tears flow then. It was strange that after almost thirty five years of marriage, Clinton still had this effect on me. But I knew it hadn’t always been like this.
Clinton had been dreamer. Boy, could that man dream. It was the very thing that had made me fall in love with him. Back then, the light in his eyes wasn’t that of sorrow. They lit up with dreams and a hope that couldn’t be extinguished. I’d taken one look at him on that fateful college presentation day when he described how his future would be in the next ten years, eyes shining, full lips curved with smiles, hands gesticulating wildly in a way that had everyone transfixed, and I whispered,
“Mine.”
I doubt anyone had heard me but I guess the heavens did. And so on a warm afternoon in Bayview Gardens, surrounded by our family and a few friends, we tied the knot and jumped the broom.
But you see back then, we had been in our twenties. As Clinton would talk to me every night, talking about his Roboticist dreams, I’d smile at him from my table where I studied for my Residency. We'd established a comfortable routine. I’d talk about my dreams, which were pretty simple. A successful neurosurgeon who would be able to give back to her people, and then he’d regale me with his. He’d speak with that fond light of his and I’d cheer, not daring to close my eyes so I don’t miss out on a word of it.
Fast forward to five years later and dreams had been realized. Dr. Karen Madrid and her dashing husband, the tabloids would say. Clinton would pose with me for every shoot, never once leaving my side. Always having a smile, a smile that was only for me, ready on his lips. That’s until we got to our car where he would let go of my hand and go lost in thought, his eyes brimming with light. But a different one from what I once knew.
You see, not all of our dreams had been realized, and I was the one cursed with seeing the once brilliant, hope filled eyes give way to disbelief, and then to desperation, and finally to despair. It broke my heart because my husband was a hard worker, but life had it’s miserable way of dishing us cold hard truths.
First with our decision to move to another state. Work had driven me there and even though it was something I didn’t like to talk or even think about, we lived on my income. And Clinton knew that. So when we were presented with that delicious offer that proposed a life of wealth courtesy of my job, he didn’t have the heart to refuse.
And so we moved, but then Clinton crumbled. My husband would sit on his chair and stare for hours into space. His eyes illuminated by things I couldn’t see. He had long stopped talking to me about his dreams and after our failed attempts to have a child, he stopped talking to me at all.
And now, after thirty five years, living in a million-dollar home but subjected to watch my first and only love wither away, becoming a shadow of everything he once was, I ask myself. Where did it all go wrong?
What could we have done differently?
“Karen?” I sat up immediately to see Clinton on the doorway, a strange look on his face. Clinton hardly ever came to my room.
“Can I come in?” he asked. I nodded slowly, too befuddled to speak.
“Can I lay with you?” he asked, an unsureness to his tone. I nodded in a daze, scared that if I said anything, this dream I was in would dissipate. I couldn’t remember the last time Clinton laid with me.
I adjusted and he climbed in. His despair had aged him twenty years but he was still the most handsome man in my eyes. He held out his hand and I put mine in his. His eyes shone at me but this time it was with a light I hadn’t been gifted with for a decade. Love.
And so on that cool evening in my bed, we wept as we held each other. Tears from wasted years. Of what could have been. And what we could still be. Together.
I see a haggardly man with a melancholic light in his eyes.
Despondency. Resignation. Defeatism.
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