The Hunting Wives

by May Cobb

There was Margot at an upscale restaurant, raven hair perfectly coiffed.

Her chiseled shoulders are bare, her olive skin flawless.

Next to her: a broad-shouldered pillar of a woman in a simple black dress. Callie Jenkins. Margot’s best friend, according to Facebook. Shoulder-length ash-blond hair molded in a sorority cut and eyes unsmiling as she takes me in.

It wasn’t envy, though; I didn’t want to be her. It was so much more than that. I wanted to be near her. For her to notice me, too. The idea of it took my breath away. It became powerful and even consuming.

Is this what we are going to do every Saturday afternoon? Grill with our friends, as if our lives are already mapped out for us? I take a deep breath and try and push the thought aside, but as I pull the covers around me, my chest constricts and I feel as though the walls are closing in.

I take a deep breath and remind myself that I wanted all of this. So why isn’t all of this enough?

“You don’t feel worthy of love, or stability, because of the way you were raised. On some fundamental level, you’re drawn to those who don’t want you, because you didn’t feel wanted by your mom or your dad,” she said, lighting another cigarette with her dark purple lighter. “So when everything is going great, your instinct is to wreck it. But you do deserve happiness, Soph. You can be whole.

As it turns out, you can’t outrun who you are. My darker urges simply followed me here and are even more amplified because it’s so quiet, and sometimes so boring.

Even though my kitchen is practically humming with delight, I think of the boring, lonely day ahead of me—a day with no social contact until I collect Jack from preschool—and the same unsettled restlessness skulks over me, making my skin crawl, making me feel like I can’t breathe.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH me? Why can’t I be content with normal, quiet, lovely things? I mean, I am happy; there’s part of me that is fulfilled by all of this, but obviously, there’s another part that is decidedly not.

So even though I longed for this, longed for someone stable like Graham, stability feels foreign to me, and I have to fight my impulse to fidget at every turn.