Woman as Ouroboros by Claire Hanlon

     Dennis Sparks CC



Woman as Ouroboros


1. Trial by Fire

   She will start by making allowances for him. They are, after all, of an age where everyone drinks to excess. When he finds work at a brewery and brings home expired product, she will be grateful for extra money in the budget. At first he is only cruel when he drinks liquor. When there is a bottle he will not stop until it is empty, which can be anywhere from two days to a single miserable night. She will request that their house be a liquor-free zone. This will work for a while. He drinks wine and beer in the same manner, though: unstoppingly, until the bottle is empty. After some time she will notice how he is always the one pouring. She can never be sure if it is the first or the fourth or the fifteenth bottle. She will never be sure if it is the drink calling her a stupid bitch and punching holes in the wall or if it is him.
   He will say his hair-trigger anger at home is because he feels slighted at work, so she will muster understanding and look past the many ugly things he says about her. She will be supportive when he quits his job. His anger will persist and so will her forgiveness. When he returns to bartending she will put on a brave face. 
   Over many years she will observe his patterns of highs and lows. She will research symptoms of Bipolar Disorder. After their baby is born, when his manic irritability at last feels untenable, she will schedule his appointment with a psychiatrist. 
   Sitting across from the doctor she will confirm or deny as appropriate, while her husband makes a case for his disease. And when the doctor produces the phrase alcohol induced mood disorder, she will be dismayed but not surprised. She will call into work and arrange for three personal days to stay at home and care for the baby while her husband, who on those days would normally be the primary caregiver for their child, detoxes with the help of carefully titrated benzodiazepines reluctantly prescribed by the psychiatrist who strongly recommended inpatient treatment.
   Three weeks later, when it becomes clear that he was only sober for some seven-to-ten days, she will allow her husband’s best friend to arrange an intervention. And on the planned night, when she can tell that he has been drinking even though he denies it up and down, she’ll call in to work again to get the next morning off. She’ll drop the baby off at daycare like she would on any other Thursday, sit at her desk for a jittery half hour, and then drive home. She’ll park around the corner just in case he looks out the front window and becomes suspicious at the sight of their car. She’ll sit on a piano bench and tearfully, fearfully, in front of her husband, the best friend, and their priest, talk about all the ways that life has ended for her. She’ll admit she’s reached the limits of her forgiveness, that he’s blown through his chances and this is it, take it or leave it: stop drinking, full stop.
   And when, two weeks later, after he’s found a great new job that’s not in a bar and been sober for a mere handful of days, he starts drinking again—first a little and then, quickly, a lot, with the old familiar outbursts of umbrage and blame—the wife will pack an overnight bag for herself and the baby, and let a friend escort her away. 
   In the quilted safety of a guest bed, she’ll dream of being chased. 
   When she wakes up and there is no one blocking the doorway and drunkenly berating her, she will write an essay about her experience. It will pour out of her in the third person because it feels like it has happened to another woman. 
   She will feel like a perfect void of emotion encased in a body of seared meat. Trauma, she will learn to call it, but not until much later.    Someday the violence of it all will feel like a mostly forgotten dream.


2. Looped Path

   Eight years later, now wife to a different man, I return to the town where my other life ended. It is the first time visiting with my new husband and the baby who is now a nine year old boy. We stay in a bungalow not far from the one where my first life was eviscerated by bottomless thirst. As I drive my family around town, I imagine the tremors of my past shimmering across the present like a luminous hologram. I picture a version of myself living here still—stress-skinny, bruised, hollow eyed—before quickly correcting myself. The divergent other self who stayed in this town with that husband would be dead, by his hand or her own. Of this I have always been certain. 
   I—who am still alive—who, after years of minimizing my own not insignificant mental health struggles in favor of triaging my ex-husband’s crises, moved away and sought treatment—who learned to start feeling and stop dissociating—lead my family on a walk past the old house. It has been repainted from faded sage to clean white. My son walks up the front path and I call him back, worried about the privacy of the new residents. We walk on. I allow myself to look back, and see in the side yard a riotous bed of sweet peas, reseeded descendents of the originals I sewed there long ago. 
   I feel something that is not pain. I let this feeling sit in my chest and examine it gently, as I have learned to do. It is not sorrow, or anger, or resentment. It is not joy, either. It is something akin to peace. 
   It is, I realize with a measure of awe, like touching an old wound and finding that it is long healed.

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Claire Hanlon spent her formative years moving frequently between the various islands and nations of Oceania. She landed in Texas in 2016 after a decade of mostly miserable luck in California and Montana. She is slowly earning a Master of Library and Information Science degree, while working in hospice administration, reading a lot of fiction, and writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hominum Journal, Talk Vomit, Blood Orange Review, Blood Tree Literature, and elsewhere. Find her on Instagram: @loveyclairey
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