Off Script

Monday morning, he carefully kisses me awake. One hour and twenty-two minutes past dawn. Soon after, I rise. I create coffee for us both. Grinding, pressing, frothing, mixing, stirring. A single teaspoon of sugar each. The aroma circles above and around, saturating the kitchen. The articulation, the invisible smoke signal that our routine has begun.

We peruse the news on our phones, horizontally adjacent, sipping together. We live in what feels like a tiny country, two islands at the bottom of the world, also known as New Zealand. He scoffs his toast in half a minute. The dog next door yaps as he’s let out for a walk. I notice a faint high-pitched hum in my ear, though I don’t know what’s causing it.

I snack on cereal before making the dishes disappear. The aftertaste of dried apricot, sunflower seeds, trim milk, and dried oats lingers inside my cheeks. Our tested and perfected script, our morning routine. We know it well. Our lines may vary, but the gist remains the same. It fits so snugly, like a onesie.

Studying myself in the mirror, I cover my flaws with all the tools in my makeup bag. It’s an eighteen-step process. As I do final checks, I notice my dandruff has come back again.

Before he leaves he simply washes his face, shaves, and brushes his teeth. Three steps only.

*     *     *

We message through the day. Emojis, likes, GIFs, short bursts of words in texts, flurries of questions and answers. A sushi train, with tiny treats of distraction, consistently roaming round and round. Making jokes that only we comprehend. I laugh at them on the inside but my face doesn’t show it.

There’s work. I’m in my flow, embedded in my tasks. The distractions of the day sweep the ruminations of my mind away. I’m a small cog in the corporate machine. We are all just specks in the universe. That eventually turn to dust.

Around five p.m., it is time to unpick myself from the weavings of my work. Five-fifteen, to be exact. Only thirty more years till retirement. I wonder what the world will be like by then.

*     *     *

I have this feeling that I’ve lived before. Some people call it déjà vu but I think it’s more than that.

This is possibly my third or fourth life.

*     *     *

Evening now. We meet again at home. We kiss, cuddle, and cook together. Read together and tuck into bed together. His hands are always cold. We don’t know why.

As I wait for sleep to reach me, something is giving me angst. The feeling has been festering for a while now. Taking up more and more space. I blame it on my past lives, giving me inklings I never know how to translate.

*     *     *

On Tuesday, he leaves for work before sunrise has cracked its yolk.

My inklings have deeper roots now. Asking me more questions.

Why do I feel an impending sense of doom? I ask myself.

How much time have you got? I think in reply.

I decide to list my anxieties, in no particular order. An anxiety brainstorm, if you will. I certainly have particular worries on different days, but there are usually overarching themes. I wish I knew the script for the future, but I keep using the same one as the past.

Current anxieties (unranked):

What am I doing with my life?

What is the meaning of my life?

Am I becoming the best person I can be?

Am I making the right choices?

Am I with the right person?

I clock back to the last one. That hasn’t come up before.

I Google it. Did you know your Google history is never deleted? I digress.

The answers on Google perplex me even more. Kernels of doubt wildly and astronomically percolate into my brain. A veil of fatigue settles on my head. It’s metaphorically heavy, like a glass paperweight. I’m late for work.

*     *     *

At the office, I go through all the steps, the functions, the processes, the procedures I need to do to get the job done. Sometimes, when my mind zones out and I’m drifting on flow of thoughts, I feel like simply a tool. A human mechanic of society, to get the work done. Following in the cemented steps of all of those before, but evolving with the technology and education afforded to my generation.

At other times, I feel simply like a dot, so tiny and so insignificant.

*     *     *

That evening at home, he’s working late in the study. We’ve hardly spoken two sentences since I arrived. I’m assembling a salad that he’ll undoubtedly devour in front of the screen. I hear him laugh at something in the other room. I don’t ask what it was. The air settles back into place.

A few minutes later, that high-pitched hum pierces my ears. I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. Is the universe trying to communicate something to me?

“Do you hear that?” I call in the direction of the study.

“What?” he counters.

“That high-pitched noise.”

“What noise?”

“You don’t hear it?”

He appears at the doorway. The hum ceases.

“Never mind,” I say. “When will you join me, babe?”

“Later.”

“Okay.”

*     *     *

On Wednesday, I remain steadfast to the routine that we have built. There’s no need to disrupt it without something solid, something substantial, something unavoidable demanding that I do so. The certainty of our routine, no matter how mundane, comforts me so that I feel less distress about the future.

While he descends into the couch, after dinner, under the spell of the TV, I tell him I’ll join him in a minute or two. I like to put away the remnants and receipts of the day: clothing, bags, bits, pieces. I neaten our shared closet, rearranging and making the space between the hangers perfectly even. The way I learned in my retail job when I was a twenty-something.

At the back of the closet, in his small half, I spy something green. It’s dark olive meets blended linen. Something succulently new. Something I haven’t seen before.

A fresh, pristine shirt.

We’ve gone off script.

He never buys his own shirts. He detests shopping, just as most children detest homework. He’d much rather like to see the money accumulate in his bank account than spend it.

I slip next to him on the couch and offer a kiss. He accepts it. He doesn’t make any bids of his own for attention. Entwined on the couch, we share our body heat, but nothing else.

*     *     *

While he sleeps, the search engine offers me no assurance. I ask what it means when my husband buys a new shirt, and who the item is for. I uncover multiple chat threads of people with failed marriages and relationships. Hours are lost down the rabbit hole, reading all the threads over and over. I am threaded to the threads now. They have woven around me, a nest of probabilities.

My anxiety is growing. Shape-shifting. Swarming, seething, suspicious. Emulsifying.

*     *     *

The next day, at dinnertime, I speak enough to meet expectations. To hit the quota of normality. He keeps the conversation flowing. He’s in a positive mood. Why is that? I ask myself. I nod and keep the veneer intact. I’ve tucked my torments tidily away, compartmentalised. They fold up nicely.

I play this game sometimes, with myself. A one-player game. That’s how I invented it.

It’s called If I never existed and it’s exactly how it sounds:

If I never existed, what would my family be like?

If I never existed, who would live in this house?

If I never existed, who would my husband be with?

If I never existed, would the world be any different?

My thoughts won’t stop speaking to me.

*     *     *

We kiss before bed. I press in, holding it for longer. He pulls away first. I feel like a squashed flower. His polar hand squeezes my shoulder.

“Good night,” he says.

“’Night,” I say.

My brain stays up for another hour, shifting and sorting theories about the green shirt.

*     *     *

On Thursday, he leaves early in the morning and stays out at a work event that night. He doesn’t Instagram anything, so I have no idea what happened. This is unusual.

*     *     *

At dusk, I search for more clues. A detective of my own life, pursuing hard evidence. Like I’m in a TV show. Why? Because right now, I have no real proof. A feeling is not proof. Although I think my past lives are leading my instinct, giving me a spooked signal.

I’m foraging for any little pieces. In private places. Bedside drawers, clandestine corners of the closet, shadowy pockets of jackets. Bathroom drawers, bottom drawers, unsavoury spots that might hold something unusual.

The lower bathroom drawer is stiff. After a sharp tug, it juts open. I sift through the contents. Half-used bottles of this and that. At the back, a new, almost completely full bottle of cologne piques my interest. The plot thickens. It’s top-tier designer. I’ve never seen it before.

The maths. I do the maths. The sum of us. The arithmetic. To me, it’s still adding up. A couple of minor subtractions but nothing catastrophic.

*     *     *

Midnight is tiptoeing towards me. I’ve nearly wrapped up my book, an avant-garde novel from a Japanese author. I’m thankful for this strange book allowing me a small escape from my current universe.

My world dips into a blackout. I won’t even tell you how daunting my dreams are.

*     *     *

On Friday, he kisses me awake in the morning. Back to the script, to standard programming. My instinct says otherwise. My past lives know best.

What will the next few days hold? The future, I can never know. In the time of Y2K, the year 1999, was when my anxiety began. It takes me back. To that feeling that we were on the brink of something, possibly catastrophic. The world as we knew it might end. We truly believed it. And felt powerless and superstitious in its wake.

*     *     *

Later. He isn’t home. A night out with the boys. That’s what he told me. Fair enough. No Instagram pics. I’m hungry for details, but remain starving.

Dinner tastes like nothing. My mouth must be malfunctioning. The dog next door is alone and lonely, barking on and off. Sounds like he needs a hug, too.

I go driving alone. Rolling by the restaurants, the beachfront, the bars, the people. They all appear blissful and carefree. I used to be that way. But now, well.

My legs take me for a stroll. Meandering down the street, I wonder if everyone can see the trepidation on my face. Probably not.

My sister calls me. I decline to answer. My friends ping me on a group chat. I mute it.

*     *     *

An hour later, I land myself back home in the dark. His laptop breathes two words to me: Search history. His search history. He wouldn’t delete it, because I never snoop. Until now.

There’s a lot to go through. But I hack at it. It’s insightful. A peek into someone’s thoughts. I find some rather revealing searches from last week. I won’t tell you what they were, but I’ll tell you how they made me feel. The world, as I once saw it, is compromised. It’s unequivocally the signal to start rehearsing for the conversation that I knew was coming. Although I will never be ready for it.

I do my homework, rehearsing in my mind for every conceivable scenario. Like a chess game, preparing for every move and thinking about my response. Full knowing that it most likely won’t be this way, but somehow it helps me feel in control. As if I’ve already seen the future and stepped back into the past.

*     *     *

Saturday. I wake early, before the usual commencement time of our morning routine. My dandruff is worse, snowing all over the bathroom floor.

Quietly, I brew a black tea. Add a gossamer-thin slice of lemon. Sip it at the table as I rehearse the conversation in my head. It’s a dull, faceless morning.

I feel my wedding ring, with awareness that it has mutated into something more of an artefact than a promise. My guts are twisted tight like liquorice. My mind is full of pillowy echoes of melancholy and malaise. My existence feels ephemeral. Sooner or later, we all turn to dust.

*     *     *

He wakes. I create coffee. We coagulate at the table. I let our routine unfold as it used to. The well-trod path that’s now all muddy. Now, with a bird’s-eye view, my life looks different with how it’s rewritten itself.

Under the table, I pinch my leg to prepare for the pain to follow. Not enough to make my eyes water, but nearly.

“Do you have feelings for someone else?”

It rolls out of me so quickly, I’m stunned that I just said it. The rising inflection on my last syllable is a pitch higher than how I would normally speak, uneasy and inelegant.

A roll of wind hurls itself at the window. It rattles the mouths of our curtains. Filling the lull before his reply.

“It was only a kiss.”

That’s how he saw it.

Only. A. Kiss.

“We can go back. We can,” he insists.

But we had tripped rather terribly, and could only fall forward.

The static in my brain has a high-pitched hum. My ears might explode.

We used to be misfits drawn together by a love of puzzles, quizzes, record-collecting, people-watching, and antique collecting. The shine we once had is now oxidised to a murky patina.

I think through everything that will happen henceforth. The fact that this won’t hit me for a few days. For me, emotional earthquakes always take time to sink in. The division of assets. The change in living situation. The fact that I’ll be broken but have to patch myself together enough to exist at work on Monday. How will I rewrite this chapter of my life?

*     *     *

If I had the chance, I’d it all over again. I cannot explain why. 

We coalesce into what resembles a hug. It lasts for many heartbeats. He senses I might collapse and supports me accordingly. He doesn’t allow me to fall down. The humming in my ears (or mind?) ceases. He keeps me upright. This time, his hands feel ever so warm. Why is that?

With every second, I am disintegrating into dust. It gives me déjà vu.

JUSTENE MUSIN

Justene Musin’s writing has been published in Macrame Literary Journal, Waffle Fried Literary Magazine, Litbreak Magazine, Landfall Tauraka, and elsewhere. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand and is currently working on her first short story collection.