You ever lie there at three in the morning listening to the sirens outside on the street and your husband is snoring next to you and it hits you that you’ve been acting for thirty years? Not even like a good actor but just someone following a script because that’s what everyone else was doing back then and now you’re sixty and the kids are out of the house and the apartment feels way too quiet even with all the noise from the traffic. Dave is a good guy he really is but when he touches my shoulder or tries to be sweet I just feel... nothing. Not even annoyed just completely blank like he’s a stranger at the grocery store who accidentally bumped into my cart and I just want to move away as fast as I can without making a scene. Sometimes you look back at your wedding photos and you don’t see a happy bride you see a girl who was terrified of being alone in a city this big and this expensive where you need two incomes just to breathe and stay afloat. You tell yourself it’s just the stress of the kids or the mortgage but then you remember that woman you met in that pottery class over in Brooklyn back in the nineties and how your heart did this weird flip just because she touched your hand to show you how to shape the clay. You buried it so deep because you HAD to and you had the kids to think about and now it’s like this ghost is waking up and she’s screaming that we wasted everything on a life we didn't even want. It’s the way you find yourself staring at women on the train or at the museum, not in a weird way but in a JEALOUS way because they look so comfortable and you realize you’ve been wearing a mask so long your face actually hurts from the fake smiling. You spend all day cleaning this place and thinking about what kind of dinner he wants or if the dry cleaning is ready but inside you’re wondering what it would be like to just be with someone who actually gets it, someone soft, someone who doesn't make you feel like you’re performing some kind of duty every single night. You see a couple of women holding hands near the park and you feel this sharp pain in your chest because you realize that could have been you if you hadn't been so scared of what your mother would say. You start thinking about him retiring in a few years and moving out of the city and you realize you don’t want to go with him, you don’t want to spend twenty more years pretending to care about his hobbies or his old stories from the office. It feels like a CRIME to say it out loud but I think I’ve been a lie this whole time and the worst part is I don't even know if I can change it now because everything is so tied up in the money and the family and the way people look at us at dinner parties. You feel like such a fraud every time someone says "oh you guys are such a solid couple" and you just want to scream that you haven't felt a single spark since the Reagan administration. And now I’m just sitting here on the bathroom floor typing this because the thought of getting back into that bed makes me feel like I’m suffocating and I keep wondering if I ever even liked men at all or if I just liked the safety they provided in a world that feels so fast and aggressive. You spend your whole life building a foundation and then you wake up and realize you built the house on the wrong side of the world and there’s no way to move it without breaking everything and everyone you care about.