Little Talks

I think of a fairly newly married couple. They bought a huge, Victorian fixer-upper. When they first married, the wife was fine and normal, but soon afterwards she would get paranoid and not like him to go to work and leave her alone. He is kind and considerate of her, "Hold my hand I'll walk with you my dear." She lays awake at night, tossing and turning "Stairs creak as I sleep it's keeping me awake." He says sweet things to comfort her, "It's the house telling you to close your eyes."

She gets worse. "Some days I can't even dress myself." He's worried about her "It's killing me to see you this way."

Going downhill even more, she tells him that she hears voices in her head. He makes light of it, "Well tell her that I miss our little talks." He tells her so many comforting lies about how she's just going through a hard time and it will all be over soon, that she starts to believe them "Soon it will all be over and buried with our past." But he doesn't really believe it. He reminices to himself, "We used to play outside when we were young, and full of life and full of love." Even though it wasn't all that long ago, it feels like it.

She flies into rages and screams at him and says dreadful things, but afterwards she tells him that he shouldn't listen to her, she doesn't really know what she is saying. "Don't listen to a word I say, The screams all sound the same."

Through it all, they try to be positive, even though the wya she seems the world gets more and more off-kilter every day "Though the truth may vary" They want to ride the "ship" of their love through the storm. They will make it safely to shore, but by then they will be only "bodies," shells of their former selves.

Finally, she's gone, he watched her "disapear," or deteriorate to nothing. Whether she is actually dead or her mind is in such tatters that she is as good as gone. When he sleeps, he can remember her as she used to be. He tries to cling to that image of the girl he married.