I wash your tombstone with bleach once every three days. It’s a little risky, I’m sure, but it does the job just fine. I’m careful to keep your flowers out of the way, when I’m bleaching. I always pick the most pungent bouquets for you; they’re beautiful in a way I think you’d have appreciated, once. There’s a strange sort of charm that draws me to them – the kind that I imagine drew you to me, all those years ago.

Life has been quiet without you in it. I used to think I liked the silence, when it made its rare appearance. Now, I’ll admit, it’s quite stifling. Lonely. Sometimes, I think I can hear you getting home from work, a phantom click as the front door opens and closes again. My heart does these silly little flips in its cage, sputtering and tripping over itself at the imaginary sound. I know it’s not you, of course. You can’t open doors anymore. You can’t slam them, either.

I do miss you.

It’s been a while since I slept comfortably without you on your side of the bed. I often imagine little divots in the mattress where your body isn’t. It’s cold, too. I never realised how much heat you radiated until the fire had gone out. My fingers are permanently frozen. Almost as cold as yours were, the day I buried you. I’ll never forget that day. Or the days before it, for that matter.

Did you know what was coming? Did you know? Not that it matters now. You can’t answer me.

You used to be such a gentleman. Not in the traditional way, God knows that, but you sure did sweep me off my feet. I was much younger then. You seemed to really love me, in the beginning. Right up to our wedding night. How many years did we spend in bliss? Blissful ignorance, one might say. Before you started working late, forgetting the woman you left all alone, in the home you were supposed to share.

I wonder – if you’d forgotten me entirely – would you have kept your hands to yourself?

If you could have looked me in the eyes and called me a stranger, would you have been less violent? Would a stranger have deserved more of your love than I did? Unless throwing empty glass bottles at my head was how you showed your love. In which case, I was the luckiest girl in the world. And maybe the bruises from your right hooks were love marks; hickeys from a broken man. Broken men break things. But that’s alright, because you’re dead now. You can’t break anything other than a few brittle bones.

It’s an odd kind of grief to prefer the dead version of one’s husband. Although I did love you in life, I’m sure of it. I used to think the world of you. Even when my cheeks had blossomed into bright shades of blue and purple under your hands, you were still the man I married. The man I used to know.

Sometimes I wish I’d married your corpse instead. Other times, I miss the feeling of your hands on me. They were brutal, but at least they could touch.

The only issue is – half the time – they were touching someone else.

How many times did I catch you at it? Bless your heart, you were never very bright. Always leaving some kind of clue behind; a naughty text message, or a blonde strand of hair. Sometimes you missed entire items of clothing, just strewn about on our bedroom floor like you hadn’t even considered it was our house before it was yours. It stopped being a home long before it became your whorehouse.

How would you feel if I brought some handsome gentleman here, and we made love on your grave? What if I walked all over the dirt I covered you with, before it’s even settled?

I say all this knowing that, truthfully, I could never bring myself to do it. No matter how hard I tried.

I’m going to trim your stems now, if that’s OK. The dead ends are hogging all the water.  I don’t want the bitch tending to the grave next door to start getting the wrong idea, you know? I’ll bring a fresh bunch on the weekend for you to drain the life out of.

It wasn’t easy, letting you go. You know I watched the light leave your eyes? I watched you shudder and groan my name for hours before the poison took effect. I had to bury you all on my own. Do you know how hard that was? A grieving woman, all alone, lugging her husband’s corpse into the ground.

I could have gotten the local gravediggers in on it, but that’s a risk I wasn’t willing to take. You never really know who’s a gossip; even the morbid ones like to natter on. I take it the ghosts talk to you down there, too. What do they say? Do you tell them about me?

Are you at rest? I did try to make a bit of a bed for you, with the soil and the rat carcasses. After everything, I still care for you. I make your bed and clean your stone. It comforts me to clean up after you, even now you’re gone. It really isn’t the same without you.

I wasn’t expecting to miss you this much. At the time, I had no idea I would miss you at all. Perhaps, if I’d have known beforehand, I wouldn’t have done it. Maybe I’d have had more pity when you were still alive and choking on your own blood. You were far more sensitive to the sight of your blood than you were to mine.

I still dream about that look in your eyes when you figured it out. It haunts me, follows me into bed in the evenings and doesn’t leave until I’m sat right here, weeping on your stone.

I won’t bore you much longer with my lamentations. The flowers are almost finished; just one more stem to cut, and then I’ll give them back. I do worry, sometimes, that all this gardening will tarnish my wedding ring. It’s been through a lot, you know. With the bleach and the soil. I like to keep it on. It reminds me of you; of who you were before all of this.

I’ll put the veil back on now. I hate the sensation of it, but strangely, it feels necessary. Respectful, I suppose. But the fabric is far too thick for my liking. It irritates my skin the same way you used to. It feels a little like insects have burrowed into the epidermis layer and started partying without my consent. Funny how things repeat themselves in circles.

Do me a favour, darling. Don’t go telling tales on me down there, will you? Best we keep this our little secret. Just you and me. There was never really an ‘us’ before ‘death do us part,’ but maybe we could start over. Do you forgive me?

Personally, I think there is a very simple explanation. And that is to teach society the difference between feelings, thoughts, and actions. As one of my favourite women in fiction said:

We cannot help how we feel, but we can help how we behave.

~ Moira Strand, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

Feel what you feel freely, and behave how you choose to.

To me, it’s that simple. Or it is now, at least. As a child and pre-teen, I lived in shame. I, too, could not differentiate between thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, so I locked away anything I deemed ‘wrong’ or ‘disgusting’ and almost drove myself mad with the belief that I was a terrible human being, simply for feeling.

And that isn’t a typo or mistake. I am not specifying any one particular feeling because I do not need to and do not mean to. Feeling in itself is an innate part of existence that, as Moira simply states, ‘we cannot help’ - they just happen, and we are merely their host. A body; an output.

What society seemingly hasn’t yet learnt, is that it’s ok to sit with those ‘ugly feelings’. It’s ok to sit with ugly thoughts, too - since they are generally the catalyst of feelings. Think about it like this:

You have a simple, three-part flow chart. It begins with thoughts, then feelings, then actions. That is the basic concept of our existence as humans. When you experience each of these actions individually or in conjunction, they are much less simple. They’re messy, and ugly, and sometimes so deeply disturbing that you refuse to acknowledge they could have ever originated from you.

But they did, and that’s ok. Because in this flow chart, you have the choice to decide whether one flows in to the next or not. Like a valve; the flow is not without boundaries. Boundaries that you can create. Boundaries that should allow you to acknowledge ugly thoughts, feel ugly feelings, and then stop and decide whether or not you want the flow to continue into ugly deeds.

I believe there is beauty in ugly feelings. Love affairs. Family feuds. Complex emotional situations created by feelings we might not want to acknowledge, let alone accept, or act upon. But to feel is to be alive, even in the ugly parts, and I think the complexity and the depth of that is astoundingly beautiful, even when the actual result isn’t. I’d like to say here that I deeply believe in the phrase ‘there is no such thing as bad people, only people who do bad things.’ (I apologise that I have no reference for this - please comment if you know where this originates!)

Realistically, we’re all just human beings trying to exist in a world that tells us to hide, to conform, to feel in a way deemed acceptable, because our stifled suffering is more efficient and more profitable.

I’m here to say this:

Fuck. That.

OK - maybe the beauty I just mentioned is irrelevant, or flawed, at least. Connection can be ugly. And yet, when it’s right, it always fits. Have you ever had that one person whose mere existence feels like home? Not just home, but an extension of yourself; an embodiment of your entire soul in another human being that you are consistently attracted to, in one way or another. Yes, platonic included. Familial, included. Your ‘soul-partner’ (as I’m going to call it from now on, since I do not believe that I am referring to soul-mates) may not be your romantic relationship, may not even be a friend you’ve known since childhood. It could be a sibling, or a parent, or a new friend you met in the last few years of your life. It could well be a total stranger from the other side of the planet, speaking another language with entirely different habits and cultures than your own. And this especially begs the question: if humans were made to be paired - a two for one package deal - then is it possible that some people may never meet their ‘soul-partner’? Or, is it left to fate to draw us together, leading paired souls to one another with carefully placed bread crumbs of coincidences and chance?

I should have began this conversation with this: I do not have an answer to these questions. I am merely opening up an avenue of theory, of speculation. I am no scientist, nor prophet. I leave these questions open for the jury to consider.

So, by all means - consider.

Love, wholeheartedly, not just with the half beating in your chest.