Txema Rodríguez

My life as a sick person began the day I got married. Everyone seemed to think that I should not wait to tie the knot, as I was thirty and single, which was the same to say that I had already become a spinster. Family matchmakers usually mistake similar lifestyle and habits for real connection. Besides there’s no reason to stay alone if you can share your misery with someone alike. We both are aloof, old-fashioned and quite unexciting people. It was pure common sense to pair us and it naturally happened in my sister’s wedding banquet. Obviously, they were in a hurry to get rid of ‘my problem’ and I couldn’t say no the popular demand.
We danced, we started to date and we finally got engaged.
There was nothing actually wrong with him, although he was quite down in the shadows: a laconic, methodical and flat forty-two year old man. The kind of man who gets up at half past six in the morning every day, and goes to bed at eleven every night, after rinsing his mouth and gargling exactly seventy times, not more, nor less.
The atrocious headaches started during our honeymoon in Benidorm and didn’t get any better in the following days. Imagine the bright sun, the holiday noise, the crowded beaches, the open-air dances and my brains smashed with an invisible hammer no matter the pain killers I was swallowing down like candy.
Although the bizarre auras and disturbing delusions caused by migraine I managed to keep the house clean and tidy, to cook, iron and do the groceries without going mad.
After our first anniversary everyone started to wonder about the babies. We went through the procedure twice a week, but the babies didn’t come and we stopped trying when I reached my forties. We got twin beds and watched television.
Neither of us had great expectations about the other. He was noiseless and respectful, he never complained about my aches and pains and I stopped longing for a more communicative and affectionate husband as a newly-wed, so the marriage worked fine according the standards.
But one day he got up and in the middle of his morning shave he told me that he had a business travel to Malaga that same morning, the first in twenty years of marriage. He left with a small suitcase and a hand bag, he kissed me and announced he was coming back on Sunday.
I spent five days alone, totally migraine free. I was bursting with energy, I wanted to go out and buy new clothes, change my haircut and even call old friends, go to the cinema and dine out.
I was so blissful, so thrilled, so elated that took me almost three days to do the math and establish a direct link between despair and my husband.
An embittered flare up of animosity traveled through my entire body: he had been sucking my energy from the very first moment we met. I hated him, I hated the people who blackmailed us into marriage and I wanted to clear the venom out of me once and forever.
On Saturday night I seasoned his soup with insecticide. He survived and bashfully dismissed my crime as if it were a trivial, marginal event. At the hospital, they asked him about me and he alleged he had been away for a week and already felt sick in the journey back from Malaga. They declared the whole thing an accidental poisoning and I forbear the stabbing headaches as part of my punishment.
Maybe happiness is not for everybody.
One should be grateful for the small givens without asking for more.