Sometimes I Lie

by Alice Feeney

I hated being on TV. But Paul was devastated. He liked that version of me. He loved her. I got under his feet at home all the time. I wasn’t the woman he married. I was unemployed, I didn’t dress the same, and I no longer had any stories to tell. Last year at a wedding, the couple sitting next to us asked what I did. Paul answered before I had a chance to. “Nothing.” The somebody he loved became a nobody he loathed.

It has a smell of its own, time. Like a familiar room. When it’s no longer your own you crave it, you salivate and you hunger for it, you realize you’d do anything to have it back. Until it is yours again, you steal stolen seconds and gobble up misused minutes, sticking them all together to make a delicate chain of borrowed time, hoping it will stretch. Hoping it will be long enough to reach the next page. If there is a next page.