I am very interested in why people do the things they do. What motivates someone, for instance, to blow up a building, or to rob a bank? So often in fiction, when it’s the protagonist doing these things, we get some sort of lengthy explanation so that our hero can still have socially acceptable morals, or otherwise we’re told they were coerced into their bad behavior. This story is a subversion of that.
You might call it the blues.
We both met her around the same time. I remember the night very well. The 28th of last February. If there are two days I’ll never forget as long as I live they’ll be yesterday and the 28th of last February.
She was… stunning. I don’t know how else to put it. We had been told beforehand who were going to meet but I don’t think the photos we had seen had done her any sort of justice. The emotional effect she had on the both of us was hard to describe. There was something overpowering about that girl, something I can’t precisely relate to you. You just had to be there. Something in the combination of the place and the time and her face and the way she talked. I don’t remember what she said. I’m certain it was nonsense. I’m certain it was absolutely meaningless and the precise language she used couldn’t mean less, but it didn’t matter to either of us. The way she said it was beautiful.
There’s this feeling that you get when you know you’ve lost. Do you know what I mean? When you know that someone out there is better than you. When you realize you’re not special. Maybe you’ve never experienced it, like I hadn’t until that day. I know that she never experienced it. But it hits you hard. I mean, we’re already so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that you try to justify your existence with qualifiers. When you’re a little kid you tell yourself you’re the best tennis player in the whole world. Then, when you’re a teenager, you content yourself on being the best tennis player on your school’s tennis team, maybe the best tennis player in your county or, if you’re lucky, your state. I’m 33. Two years ago I had one of the happiest moments of my life because I came second in the Waterloo YMCA’s thirties to forties women’s singles tournament. But you still hold on to some sort of superlative. No matter how hard this world tries to make you feel like you’re not special, like there’s nothing unique about you, like there’s nothing you’re the best at, you hold on to being the best of however small of a group you need.
It reminds me of an old joke I heard in college. Everyone’s special, because if anyone wasn’t special, that would be a pretty special characteristic itself.
I didn’t say it was a good joke. I probably shouldn’t have even called it a joke. It’s just a stupid truism that breaks down once you think about it for more than half a second. That’s all I can put together right now. I’m sorry, I’m just tired. I haven’t slept in probably a week. Well, anyway, I think it was meeting her that taught me just how special I’m not. Beautiful blue eyes. A beautiful laugh. I couldn’t help but smile whenever she was around. And I noticed the same in him. He was always smiling. He would still kiss me, sometimes, tell me how much he loved me, but it never felt the same after we both met her. There was something unspoken. “I love you,” he would whisper whenever the two of us were alone, and something in his eyes and his tone of voice would finish the sentence, “almost as much as I love her.”
He spent less and less time with me. He’s lucky enough to work this contract job with somewhat of an irregular schedule, so he would get home late most nights, by which time I was already in bed. Not that I was sleeping. After a couple of weeks, I was hardly ever sleeping, even when he thought I was, because I could tell he wasn’t trying to hide it at all. He would come in the house and I would hear the sound of his voice, talking to her about his day. I never heard what she said in response, but it didn’t matter. He had never told me about his day.
And I think that’s when the blues started. Blue might not be dark or violent enough of a color for it; maybe it was something closer to crimson. Because that was what I saw every day when I woke up and had to hear about the girl. I remember the days when he asked me if I had slept all right, bombarded me with affection in the mornings before I had had enough coffee to process everything. Now, you could tell he had hardly slept either. Only there was a difference between him and me. He hadn’t slept because he was in love with that girl. I hadn’t slept because I despised her.
I tried to avoid situations where I knew the two of them would be together. Of course, he was getting bolder and bolder with where he brought her, almost as if our marriage had been instantly discredited and replaced with the love he felt for her. And so I had to go further and further from him, which of course meant he would spend more time with the girl, and he didn’t seem to care. It was as though he hardly even noticed I existed at some point, and so all I could do was spew vitriol at the girl whenever I saw her, try to reinforce some point in her mind that she ought to have been sorry for something. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was no specific characteristic of her to hate, which just made me hate her even more. I had lost. The one person I had been happiest to spend my life with had turned around and walked away from me. Everything he did these days was just a middle finger straight at me.
By yesterday, it had probably been about a week since I’d last slept. I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think I was thinking anymore, just sort of operating on autopilot, my head resting while my body was going through the motions of wakefulness and vice versa. And my semi-conscious body was moving toward the kitchen. I vaguely remember picking up a knife and moving to the crib. I vaguely remember my arm going back and forth and back and forth. I vaguely remember a lot of noise. I vaguely remember the color red. I vaguely remember the look on my husband’s face, watching his daughter die, the one thing that truly mattered to him disappearing forever, and I vaguely remember my arm going straight across his throat and the sound of his body falling to the ground—
And then I guess I fainted.
Well, that’s what happened, and I stand by all of it. The blues make reasonable people do crazy things, and I’m a reasonable person of sound mind and body. Lock me up for a million years, but I did what had to be done.
I’ve got nothing more to say to you.