Chapter 4: A Little Ache

It was no one’s fault but my own.

Audio of Yan reading Chapter 4 available under the cut.

It started as a little ache. 

The thing that kept me up at night. Awake in the wide open dark which was all I had to keep for myself. The dark was the place I knew no one would come looking for me.

Did the ache come from staying up to watch Grey’s Anatomy? 

Did the ache come from the defeat that was moving to a suburb outside of Denver, Colorado and restarting my business for the third time? 

Did the ache come from that fabricated house? The one with so many rooms, and my realization that I had so few possessions, or such little love to fill the rooms with? 

Wherever it came from, the ache felt like something green and curled and delicate way under the ground. It felt as spiralled as the beginning of spring and as primal as the source all life leaps from. 

It was all the life I had left—my wanting. 

Or rather, the only tendril of it I knew at the time to recognize. 

I did not know how to identify the softer calls of life itself; gentle songs that beckoned me but that I turned from. Songs like the gleam of my daughters’ too big and too round eyes. Songs like the toddler hands of my son—banging on the glass shower door, begging to be let in. I would go to the hot water to remember who I was before thought, to ask my skin to be made pink. But there was my son, boundary-less as the heart. Insisting to be held. Insisting he join my solitude. And maybe his insistence held me more than I held him. 

I would write that it wasn't all as dramatic as that. But the fact is, it WAS that dramatic. It was because I made it so. Because in the night, after my family was asleep, I watched hours of Grey’s Anatomy—sexy doctors and interns who did nothing BUT drama both in the ER and in the break room. In the ER they confronted death and sometimes restored it to life. In the break room they opted to sleep with each other instead of getting actual sleep. 

There they were, constantly at the threshold of make or break, life or death, sex or…..sex. 

And there I was. At the threshold of my marriage making it or not. At being able to support my family or not. At being able to see my children for who they were, or not.

The stakes felt as high, but the sex looked a lot better than what I was having. And the Grey’s Anatomy staff were making jokes the whole time. This was instructive. I saw lives could fall apart. People could live or die.

Relationships could exploit or ruin. Lust could overcome you and you know what? It wasn't so serious. You could just laugh and shrug your shoulders. 

Sure. 

The drama was high. 
The tears.
The yells. 
The laughing.

But like a dream, I saw one could let it all roll merrily along. 

I wanted that. I wanted to choose the full drama with the ability to laugh my way down the stream. With the ability to understand it all dissolves by morning. 

Was this realistic? No. Mature? Of course not. But you have to remember how horny I was. How horniness shrinks the brain.  

I tried to spice up my sex life with my husband. I asked if we could film ourselves. We did. Meh. I wore more lingerie. Boring. I Gmail chatted my inappropriate crush, who did not know I had a crush on him, and mostly told me about the woman he’d been pursuing for more than a year. Still, I could not seem to scratch the itch I was looking to scratch.  

Then suddenly, a lightning bolt.