the undoing.
The dining room was pitch black.
Rain softly pattered against the stained glass window above the dining room table. I sat on the cold floor trying to grab onto the soft, worn wood beneath me my body. Digging my fingernails in, desperate for anything to hold onto.
I choked on my breath as a mixture of salt water and snot drained off my face and onto the floor beneath me. I’d been scraping myself off this cold floor for months now. I was tired.
It had been six months since my husband left.
Throughout it all, there wasn’t a point of time when I didn’t think my husband and I would be together. But it happened, one sunny afternoon in June over a half eaten burrito left on the dining room table from lunch.
The trade winds blew the subtle scent of salt water and plumeria through the open windows. I watched as the sheer white curtains of our bedroom dance across the surface of a fig leaf as he packed a large black duffel bag.
Without another word, he opened the screen door to our Mililani home, and walked out. I never saw him again.
The next day was our first ultrasound. I was three months pregnant. A girl.
We named her before she was ever conceived while sipping Cabernet in an airport bar six months earlier.
Winter Ailith Blair. Winter warrior. A nod to the season we were married.
But even conceiving her was camouflaged in false positivity. The morning after getting pregnant, I woke up naked in bed with the overwhelming taste of iron in my mouth.
I knew something was wrong—I never slept in bed with my husband.
My jaw ached as I sat up in bed. My tongue instinctually moved to the source of pain only to find the space empty. My tooth was gone.
The drunken aftermath of telling my husband I wanted to divorce.
But those aren’t the things you share about your marriage. Especially one I was so desperately trying to convince myself (and everyone else) of.
Instead, I post something quirky on social media while getting a new tooth at a dentist office shaded by rainbow eucalyptus trees—insinuating that it was just another day in paradise.
He never showed to the ultrasound that day.
Waiting awkwardly with my feet in stirrups, the nurse squeezed a large glob of KY jelly on the ultrasound wand and tells me to relax.
A static-y rapid whooshing of the baby’s heartbeat filled the room. I went numb as I watched the white-grey blob shape shift on the screen in front of me. There was an entire human life dancing around inside of me, and I felt fucking empty.
It wasn’t until three weeks after he swung open that screen door that June day that I finally heard from him.
Divorce papers.
Shortly after that, the baby stopped growing, and eventually her heart stopped beating.
My world was falling apart over a fucking burrito.
To be continued…