n.

For years Robert told me he would marry me the day I said I wanted to be married. So on impulse a few days ago, I told him we'd go to the courthouse and get the license, and he agreed immediately. The night before we got married I lay down in bed, sick, unable to move. My whole body was inflamed with horrible pain that I felt from the tip of my head to my toes, and it sank deep into my heart with such heaviness that I thought it might kill me. Every horrible moment I'd ever had with my husband flashed through my mind like a carousel of bad memories. I almost saw the fangs of The Thing blackened and sharp, that told me it would devour me if I committed to marriage. If I committed to MISERY FOR ALL ETERNITY. But I was familiar with my own self-sabotage, and I recognized I was trying to kill a good thing in me, because it would mean I'd have to recognize that I was actually loved. And if I was actually loved, that meant the protective mechanism inside of me would have no foothold. So the next morning I laughed it off, did my hair, put on a nice dress, and went into the city and got married. And I realized a part of me was clutching onto the desperate hope that Robert didn't love me, and he was holding out on me, one last trump card, and our entire life was built on a shaky foundation of lies. But he married me like it was nothing. Because to him it was nothing, because he'd already given me everything. And so when I wake up, and he calls me wife, I feel that last trembling, fearful, guarded part of me unable to spew its normal convenient lies about my undesirability, my alien ugliness, my unworthiness. There is no hold out. No easy trick. I have everything. I always did. I'm not saying that THING inside me has disappeared. It hasn't. But it's lost one of its easiest power vectors.