A-minor

by Mekiya Outini

but mostly sickness. We’re only in our thirties, but when my wife sits for too long on the wrong chair, when she swallows a morsel of gluten, when the temperature drops below seventy-five, when the chronic pain hits, when her muscles seize, she ages fifty years in fifteen minutes. We grimly joke that if the world knew how long it takes for her to cross the living room, they’d imagine a floor plan in Bezos’s tax bracket. That if I were to start drafting a novel when she sets out from the kitchen, it’ll be on its way to the publisher by the time she arrives in the bedroom.

Every night, I crouch above her, massaging a bottom as shrunken and brown as a dried apple, hoping to banish this premature rigor mortis, to press some warmth back into her.

Some nights, our efforts halve the pain. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we might reduce it by seventy-five percent. Rarely does it drop it below this threshold. “It’s like someone’s chopping my hips with an axe,” she tells me. “It’s like fire.”

It’s like her uncles and aunts and cousins who used to beat her have returned. It’s like she’s sleeping once more where she slept for six years, on the rocks and in the snow. It’s like the past cohabits with us, dining at our table while we picnic on the floor, unable to find a chair that doesn’t torture her, sleeping on our mattress while we spoon on the floor because the bed exacerbates her pain. She has achieved what few survivors ever can achieve—happiness, humor, and even self-love—but the trauma needed somewhere to go, so it went to her body. There, it takes its final stand.

I’m the only one who knows—but now you’re reading this, so you know, too.

When she joins a meeting, when she gives a presentation, when she sits for an interview, she reaches down inside herself and grabs the pain, wraps a fist around it, and pushes it down into a place you’ll never guess existed. She sits in her office chair, switches the lights and camera on, and smiles, and nods, and laughs along. No matter how her muscles seize, she never lets them choke that laugh.

Every morning, she’s awake by 3:00 a.m. She works straight through to 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., goes to bed at 10:00. Her work’s paid off: she’s got a master’s degree, she’s a Fulbright scholar, Steinbeck fellow, and MacDowell fellow; she’s even been on BBC. Inspirational. That’s what people say. Inspirational, how she raised herself from homelessness and poverty. Inspirational, how she couldn’t even read before she started school at seventeen. Inspirational, how she did all this despite being blind. Inspirational, too, how she sloughed off the trauma like just the dirty rags she wore while homeless, threadbare and outgrown. Inspirational, how she laughs. Inspirational, how when the curtain closes and the lights go down, her muscles seize.

She asked me to write this. I said it wasn’t my story to tell. She asked me to write this. I said I didn’t know how. She asked me to write this. I said, “Okay. Where do I start?” She said, “That’s easy.” I said, “It’s not.” Then I started writing it and found out that I was angry, so it was.

“I don’t mind when someone’s inspired,” she says, “when they do something with that inspiration. Something real. But for some people, they just say the words and move on.”

I suppose I can admit, then, that I am inspired, too. Inspired to drag myself into our work each morning despite the exhaustion, despite the insomnia, despite the anxiety, despite the chronic lethargy, despite the brain fogs, and sometimes, yes, despite the pain. I’m lying on my stomach as I type this because we slept on a bed last night because we’re traveling and you can’t really sleep on the floor in a hotel, and now my buttocks are tenderized mincemeat, and my back and shoulders are aching from holding myself in the cobra position, and so I make a standing desk from an upturned bucket on the table, but the damage is already done. But this essay will be too, soon. Most days, with yoga, turmeric, and vitamin D, I keep my pain under control, but who knows how much longer this will last. We’re only in our thirties.

In sickness and in health. So said the judge who married us—hastily, without a ceremony, in between homicide cases. No friends or relatives were there, no witnesses, no one to hold us accountable, but still we said the words. We meant the words. Perhaps we understood that in our mutual headlong sprints to stay ahead of death and poverty, we’d been approaching the outer bounds of what we could survive alone.

Perhaps the point was never “in health” at all—and I’m not just speaking for us here. Perhaps “in health” was tacked on as an afterthought when that vow was first inscribed in Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Perhaps, five centuries ago, before penicillin, before vaccines, before malaria was banished from the British marshlands, amid the rampant syphilis, scurvy, English sweat, and plague, “in health” was the exception. “In sickness” may well be the rule. The standard against which everything “in health” is measured. The independent variable. The independent clause. The clause that also means—or may mean, or may come to mean, or has already come to mean, for us, at least—“in care.”

Mekiya Outini is an award-winning author, editor, and educator with publications in The North American Review, Fourth Genre, MQR, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. He and his wife, Itto, are collaborating on several books and running an author support platform. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas.