Marriage and Bliss

follow your little heart forward, young bean!

At the time, that time when I was young and fresh and not fresh at all, it seemed like the most important thing in the world that a guy, the guy, who looked just like that dead action star – no, the other one – kept stealing my coffee order.

I didn’t necessarily own the concept of caffeine with a flash of agave, but at that time, I was jumping back into the world of sertraline and beta blockers after a little period of trying to raw-dog life, and I was weary, wearing thin, fading from beginnings and endings and everything in between. Everything was unlikely, everything was symbolic, everything was symbolically unlikely. My psychiatrist kept using the phrase ‘the patient claims’ and I felt like I was being called a liar. I didn’t like that. I was clinging to the basics, like the coffee, like my skinny jeans that were also profoundly unflattering.

I kept seeing the action star, the caffeine copycat, on my bus-rides home from the out-patient mental health unit. Our appointments must have been similar times. One day, when bold, I nodded to him, riffing on his nod, and he nodded back, again! When he got off at the hail-and-ride, I dared to wave goodbye. He waved back, through the smudged window.

I felt a hot wetness of embarrassment at even thinking that the wave meant something, and then he made a coquettish pout at me – and winked. I whispered to myself something even I couldn’t hear. But I was excited. He trundled off, a gym bag over his shoulder, his arse bobbing. As ever, he had an iced oat with agave from the coffee spot outside the psychiatry wing. An odd place for the kiosk, but perhaps also genius.

I went to the GP at first because I was having panic attacks so bad that I kept waking up soaked in my own acrid waste, and then my depression swelled too. I got referred to psychiatry and waited six months mostly in my bedroom, whispering that I was dying, that I’d die, that I was edging close to death.

I wondered if the action man had OCD or bipolar or a huge dick, a schlong that brought him sadness. I wondered what was wrong with him, or right with him. Is that fair? I’m not sure what the best language is for all that, even now. We once passed each other as I left the bathroom and he was heading in, but we didn’t speak. Oof. How I wanted him to speak to me, to curl me on his tongue and spit me away.

“So, the patient claims…”

The next time after the bathroom almost-encounter, we actually spoke! We spoke! He had a thick Kiwi accent, it turned out, and he didn’t actually like the saccharine burst of agave, but he was too afraid to ask for something else after the barista had mixed him up with someone else and their regular order. The action man turned out to be called Jeb. And Jeb was really, really nice. His calloused hands waved around as he spoke. I liked that.

“What’s the story with you then, morning-glory?” Jeb said, after he’d told me about the coffee, about the mishap.

Now that Jeb and I are married, I look back on these days with some degree of confusion. How do… things happen? Once I was crushing on Jeb and his takeaway coffee, and now we are approaching decades of wedded bliss.

Maybe bliss is a strange word. Jeb doesn’t leave the house much. Or at all. He mostly spends time with his newspapers, the piles of them, painstakingly recording how they wail and wobble to him, how he can hear their words like symphonies hovering in the air around him.

I do not hear those words. I am on quite strong anti-psychotics now, but I’m convinced that even without the pills we wouldn’t have a shared experience of almost-religion, of holy scripture in the ether. Jeb doesn’t drink coffee anymore. He glugs water from the tap like a guppy, starved with need. I always walk into the kitchen and see his bulky body bent over the sink. His bulk was initially all strength, now it’s something else.

Our wedding was all flush-pink and dandelion-yellow. I hated it. Jeb’s mother was responsible, and she was paying, so: there you go. Money talks. Jeb wore a suit that barely contained his chest. It was hot. There you go. Muscles talk.

I used to keep a gratitude journal but now I’m trying something else. A reflection of sorts, memory shaking like choppy water. Is this all fiction? Or is this what love does – makes things shift?

“Awright guvna?” he said to me as I arrived for our first real date, and my thighs tightened. A parody of my voice, but sugared too.

When I first saw Jeb, I had no idea that we’d one day actually be together, or that his life would decant down into the front room of our shared home, bought with his parents’ money, or that I would end up as a researcher at a small economic thinktank which is essentially pointless to anyone and everyone. I am firmer on the ground now. I make Jeb check in on the web-portal with the psychiatrists, who tell him to eat better, as if fucking greens are going to make him well again. I love him and I love leeks, but let’s be real.

“The patient’s partner claims…”

I still hate it.

“Love you,” I say to Jeb across the room’s threshold each day, and he nods at me back, lovingly. It is a loving nod, I promise, but how I miss his voice.

We were always meant to be in love, I think. It was written on each muscled star, but the cosmos swirls, doesn’t it? It moves. God, it moves.

IMAGE: The marriage of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou. - 1793 - Wellcome Collection, United Kingdom - CC BY.