Nothing to be Said by Melissa Wiley

Maybe about a year after we started seeing each other, you told me there was something about me that frightened you from the outset. I don’t know what I was expecting you to tell me, but you surprised me when you pointed to my forehead, to the scar that has filled the space between my eyebrows since I was four years old. The scar appeared there soon after I had contracted the chicken pox and could not keep myself from scratching. My mom had warned me against it, but I had been unable to resist once the itching became too intense while I was watching cartoons one day. I have no memory of when I first noticed the consequences of my actions. Though I was aware the scar was there, until you mentioned it, I never paid it much attention.

Before you reminded me of its presence, I always assumed my bangs hid it from anyone else who might have noticed. If there is one thing, though, that I’m learning in this lifetime, it is that nothing is hidden. Nothing can be for long, which is why the effort necessary to hide something is never worth it. Everything that exists, however deeply it may be buried, always manages to rise to the surface. It is only ever a matter of when this happens, when the truth decides to make itself apparent. As it turns out, this scar I assumed no one would ever notice had frightened you a little from the time we met, meaning my bangs did nothing. They might as well have been invisible, another one of my delusions.

You confessed your mom had a scar that looked exactly like mine, in the same place, practically at the center of her forehead. Hers had been the same size, also in the shape of a strawberry. She had died of bone cancer seven years before we met, when you were twenty years old, still a junior in college. You dropped out soon after your dad called and revealed her terminal diagnosis, and you never graduated. In spite of moving back home, you have also told me that you never visited her in the hospital as much as you should have. You have now lived longer than your mother, who died at age forty-seven.

Maybe I should, but I do not fear you dying. There is part of me, though, that dreads you getting over my death too easily. I can’t help wishing you would suffer from my absence, though I don’t have much faith in this happening, should you survive me. You have a way of moving on, a fluidity with transitions that I have never been able to emulate. Even though I know you loved your mom, you have never seemed to miss her in the same way I have my own. You don’t seem to have been as changed, as irreparably damaged. I should probably call it resilience — your natural buoyance, refusal to grow heavy. Whereas somewhere deep inside of me, a fissure releases an endless aching and sadness. At least a couple times a month, I still wake up crying.

This is one way of saying you are a person of acceptance. For you, whatever happens simply happens. You don’t seem to feel the same need most people might to intervene, to alter circumstances. While you might feel sorry about something that has happened, you don’t tend to look backward, not nearly as much as I have with both my parents. For all your easy and daily aggravation, for all your huffing over the many minor inconveniences of our shared existence, I believe you live more in the present. Compared to me, you are a happier and a lighter person. I believe I know you well enough by now to understand my own death would hardly change this.

In the past few years, I have taken to joking about your next wife, who will naturally be my opposite. She will not only be much younger in age but younger in spirit. She will be more dynamic and outgoing, someone who makes her mark on things, someone whose energy is directed outward into the world rather than turning inward, keeping quiet. Whenever we start on this subject — which somehow we have started doing more despite our good health — you like to add how your second wife also has to be sexy. She has to be voluptuous. A tomcat. You also hope she comes with a foreign accent, that she takes you home to her native country, opens up your world rather than imposes the same limitations I have.

Because my main hobbies are reading and writing, I like to keep our world mostly quiet. You allow me the silence that is food to me only at the most fleeting of intervals, at it seems. You also maintain you’re the one who suffers most in this relationship, which might be true and might not be. If you only had things the way you wish, our walls would always be pulsing with music. I would be the one who would never want to stop talking later into the evening, the one who would beg you to stay up later so the conversation never ended. Every day of our life together, your hunger for discourse seems endless, unable to be satiated, by which I mean I often find our conversations exhausting. Could anyone else spend a weekend watching or listening to us inhabit the same space, they would understand that this is, above all, a loquacious marriage. Still compared to your next one — to the wife who will be both voluptuous and extroverted — this one will seem quiet.

I have seen only one picture of your mom, whom you resemble more closely than your dad, though on the phone you sound like him. In the one picture of her you have shown me — framed on our nightstand — she is holding you, a toddler then, against a tree somewhere in Glacier National Park. She is holding you while you are reaching for your dad behind the lens, into which she also glances. Petite and pretty, she looks a little as if she might be starting to laugh, at least partially because the little boy she is holding has become so energetic. To her features as well as her expression, there is something windswept. Something about her looks as if she has surrendered, become free of all resistance.

She looks this way in her twenties, even though when she was dying in her forties you have said she succumbed to severe depression regarding her diagnosis. Like my mom in her final year, yours also suffered from a degree of pain that I hope neither one of us will have to undergo ourselves. Your mom died of bone cancer, while mine knew the pain that came from her breast cancer’s metastasis throughout her spinal column.

You never said why us having the same scar on our forehead scared you exactly. You never elaborated, and I didn’t need you to. I know you must have felt as if you were being sent a message. This message was also likely one to which you didn’t want to listen. From the beginning, you made known all the qualities I was missing, all the qualities you wanted in a woman and that I failed to offer. Looking back, it seems obvious to me these comments — your voicing of desire for someone who was more rebellious and artistic, who flaunted her sexuality, who was more competitive — were meant to either drive me away or convince me to change in some way, to become more like you wanted. The real wonder to me now is they failed to accomplish either. I stayed who I was, stayed planted.

Had I been any older when we met, I would have taken your hint. Had I only been more mature, with more confidence, I would not have stayed around to hear any more you had to say about me, nudging me toward improvement. Had I met you only a year later, once I had accrued more experience with other boys in college, I would not have kept coming over to fool around with someone eight years older who found me lacking. I didn’t like everything about you either, come to think about it. You were not an answer for me. I have never believed in asking other people to change, trying to convince them to become more like you want them to become, solely for your own benefit.

You might have moved on to another relationship, might have done this easily, because you were cockier back then. All you didn’t like about me may have also made more of a difference were it not for this scar on my forehead, had it not reminded you of your mom, had both scars not have assumed the shape of a strawberry. Maybe this convinced you your mom was watching, and she wanted you to keep me. I say this cognizant your mom would have been in her early thirties when I scratched my forehead, when she could have had nothing to do with how it happened, when she was still fully alive and had no way of knowing I existed.

For as long as your lifetimes overlapped, you had only one girlfriend, something you shared with me early on, someone whom I felt even then you were still in love with. Even almost a decade after you had last seen her, when we were first dating, her memory seemed to matter even more than your mom’s, her loss to have made more impact. Though your old girlfriend was still alive — living somewhere in Colorado, you said — she was the one I could tell a large part of you still mourned, whose memory you were fighting against. There was probably a part of you who felt you still might reconnect, might reclaim your boyhood wholeness. Whereas bringing back your mom was hopeless.

Laura had been your girlfriend throughout high school and part of college. After high school graduation, you moved to separate states but tried to stay together, tried and failed almost inevitably. You had recently decided to go your separate ways when Laura took a leave of absence, when she traveled from her college in Texas back to Missouri once she heard from her parents that your mom was dying. You said she and your mom had always liked each other, and Laura visited her several times in the hospital even though you were no longer in a relationship. She — this girlfriend of whom I’ve never seen a photograph but you have told me was curvaceous and good at science, two of your main interests — had along with all her other qualities been a good person.

You have also said it was your fault the relationship ended, and I know you still regret this, even in your late forties. Though I am long past feeling jealous, I am also aware I may still be a disappointment in comparison. I will never take more interest in science than reading a story about a scientist, never care more for facts than illusions. I will never want to go camping in the wilderness, never care to take a long hike without knowing that I’ll return to a shower and warm bed when I’m finished, whereas you two apparently liked to rough it.

Most of all, from my perspective, I will never know if your mom would have liked me as much either, if she would have considered me a poor replacement. Sometimes, looking at her face in the photograph that rests on our nightstand, I’m afraid she might have been too delicate along with too windswept for us to have had much in common. Compared to how lovely she is in this picture with a mountain behind her, I feel rough and unfeminine, my body heavy. The need I often feel to defend myself against your criticisms has probably only exacerbated this quality, this toughness that might have been the starkest difference between myself and your mom as well as the girlfriend who came to see her even after she wasn’t your girlfriend. Rather than ever being able to speak to her and look into her eyes, all I have is a strawberry at the center of my forehead.

Unlike me, you do not believe in reincarnation. Whenever I mention it, you might pretend to entertain the concept, but I also don’t think you’ve ever been persuaded this is real, what actually happens. Though you are eight years older than I am, you still feel young and fresh enough to believe that what remains of this lifetime still holds more promise than I can bring myself to believe in, than I ever did, even at my youngest. Your optimism might explain why you tend to believe this life is all we have instead. According to your personal cosmology, once our bodies go, the rest of us vanishes. At the moment of death, we have been given all we will be given. You also still think so much can happen where we are that the rest doesn’t matter yet. What happens after we die doesn’t interest you, because you are still so alive, still on fire.

The fact you are this way has to make it harder to have a wife who thinks about death on a daily basis, who doesn’t always invest what she considers only one lifetime among many with much importance, though this is how I also try to feel to keep the pain of loss from becoming so sharp, so stabbing. I know you are impermanent, but I still cannot imagine you not being here. You must realize this about me, realize how dependent in some ways I have become on someone whom I often find irritating and difficult to live with. Maybe you are kind enough to perceive my emotional dependence without telling me.

In spite of you thinking this life is all there is, in spite of your materialism, sometimes I think you might see things more as they are than most who believe in hell or heaven, more even than people like me who think of a soul as evolving through progressive incarnations. In some respects, I think you might be more aligned with spiritual reality than those who devote a fair amount of time and thought to the life to come, to transcendence. Your willingness to accept even deaths of loved ones without developing any anger, any resistance, suggests your comfort with letting things go, with moving on and believing that more movement will keep happening.

At least from my perspective, so much acceptance of people and things constantly engaged in dissolution depends on feeling something more lasting beneath them. I don’t like calling that lasting thing God, but I suppose this is what I mean. Whatever it is that I mean might be called, I think in some ways you are in touch with it. Maybe more than I am. Me with my conviction of souls transitioning from one body to another on a karmic journey. Me who still clutches to bodies, who hates to see them changing. Death — and the changes that can feel like their own death — might not weigh on you as heavily because you don’t take bodies as seriously as I have. As you often say, there is no matter, only energy. And particles of energy are always in motion, bound only by magnetics, by gravity. Everything can come apart at any moment, given the right forces. This is only natural, only to be expected.

Shortly before your mom died, you said you told her that, if part of her outlasted her body, you wanted her to come create a disturbance. You didn’t want her to hover around you like an angelic presence, to be so cliched, to act that passively. You wanted to be haunted instead. You asked for this explicitly. You wanted a woman whose life had always been quiet, who spent most of her days cooking and cleaning, to make some noise at last, to say what needed saying. This request may have partly been your way of trying to rouse her from her depression, to provoke her into embracing a new power. Because you never talk around things, you probably also wanted her to be able to face the inevitable without flinching, to stare into the chasm.

Death was clearly coming, and so you made her talk about it. You told me you made her promise to rattle windows, topple books from their shelves. You pestered her, even at the height of her illness. Because of everything I have ever known about you, this scene is easy for me to imagine. I can envision your mom lying there, supine and helpless on her hospital bed, saying yes to all your demands and entreaties, simply to have some silence. I say this with love as well as traces of bitterness when I say it is just like you to make someone promise to give you something even once they have gone all but breathless.

You said you demanded her specifically to shake and rattle objects around you, to force things to come crashing, but as far as I know she has never done so. As a consolation, all I would offer is the possibility that your mom always lived as quietly as she did because this is how she liked it, because noise was a nuisance for her as much as it is for me, whereas you enjoy constant static, revel in cacophony. Though you were her son and I am only the woman who married you, I might be in a better position to empathize with her fondness for a quiet life than you can. Though sometimes you accuse me of having a death wish, many of us feel a need to take more rest throughout a lifetime, to stay passive, simply watching. At the end of every day, everyone craves some darkness. A warm bed with no distractions — I imagine we all need this. This is when I have known you best. Once there is at last nothing more to be said — not until the sun rises — as we both fall asleep, as our jaws hang slack, our breathing lengthens.

Melissa Wiley won the 2019 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Contest for her book Skull Cathedral, linking reflections on the body’s vestigial organs with autobiographical fragments. She is also author of the personal essay collection Antlers in Space and Other Common Phenomena (Split/Lip Press, 2017), and her work has further appeared in places like Sonora Review, Terrain.org, The Rumpus, Entropy, DIAGRAM, Phoebe, Waxwing, The Offing, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn.