Our Wives Under the Sea

by Julia Armfield

I used to think there was such a thing as emptiness, that there were places in the world one could go and be alone. This, I think, is still true, but the error in my reasoning was to assume that alone was somewhere you could go, rather than somewhere you had to be left.

A long time ago, we met. I think that’s important—the fact of a meeting, the fact I remember a sense of before.

Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject. She is the world’s living expert on loving and losing thirty-year-old men named Tom.

Sometimes, I imagine the things I want to say to her, but increasingly I find myself capable of producing little but a kind of mental white noise.

I watch only movies I’ve seen before—impossible, I think, to follow something new, to find the will to do so.

The problem with relationships between women is that neither one of you is automatically the wronged party, which frankly takes a lot of the fun out of an argument.

I had intended to stay in the spare room only one night and yet somehow never moved back. This is something I am, for the moment, not willing to examine too closely.

She refused almost every aspect of my help, the way women will when they’ve been bred to accept little more than the basest civility.

It was very easy to offend my mother. Rather in the way that it’s very easy to kill an orchid, it often seemed little short of inevitable.

I find that if I squint at the television hard enough, it’s easier to think about things other than how much I miss my wife.

I considered saying something and then willed myself to kindness. How would you feel, I thought, forgetting for a moment that I was in the exact same position as her.

I don’t remember thinking we would die, so much as noting that we wouldn’t be able to come back up again. I don’t remember thinking we could fix things, only wondering what would happen next.

I’m all right, for the most part. It is only on occasion that I feel the need to scald myself down to the marrow, sugar-scrub my thighs until I bleed in streaks, and clog the drain with the expendable parts of me.

Like everyone, most of Carmen’s higher education seems to have leaked out of her around her mid-to-late twenties, replaced in the main by methods of treating black mold, by passwords and roast chicken recipes and the symptoms of cervical cancer and thrush.

“What I’m saying is, the pain is in the aftermath, more than it is the break.”