Driving to work the next day, I leave a message for the psychiatrist: “It’s happening again. Please call me back.” I repeat my name and number three times.

At the office, we discuss a blood drive promotion. I suggest offering a pint of soup for every donation, and we joke that “Pint for a Pint” sounds like beer for blood. When my phone rings, I step out to answer, and the receptionist at the psychiatrist’s office tells me to bring him in at lunch. 

Driving to get my husband, I consider several lies: I have an appointment, I’d like you to come with me; Or maybe, Let’s go to lunch! 

In the end, I tell the truth, drag him to the car, talking fast, swinging the door open. “I’m seeing symptoms again so I need you to go to the doctor. I know you don’t want to, but I don’t want to put you in the hospital again. So this is better. Please, babe, it’ll be quick, just in and out.” 

Planted next to my little blue Mazda, he clings to the edge of the door, knuckles white. He says “No, I don’t want to,” over and over.

“Please,” I beg. “We can’t afford the hospital. Remember the last bill? For twenty-two thousand?” I gesture to the open door. “Let’s just see what the doctor says.” 

 

Eight years later, in an old farmhouse on Prince Edward Island, I let the dog outside and she rushes blue jays relaxing in the backyard, scattering them toward the pines that line our fence. It’s early morning, dark purple clouds over a rising orange sun, and I’m in the middle of a panic attack. My wife is in the shower, oblivious, singing a favourite of hers—“Danger Zone” carries through the grate over the wood stove like she’s in the living room with me, which makes me laugh and stops the crying for a moment. But then she’s quiet, and my brain does its thing (a thing it used to do daily, hourly, that it does rarely these days): you unworthy, terrible spouse, undeserving of love and kindness, just tell her to leave so you won’t hurt anymore. 

I have tools now. I use the rainbow one: find something of every colour. A red fruit fly trap, a decorative orange mushroom, yellow curtains, green velvet couch covered in dog hair, blue pot with a pothos plant I’ve been meaning to water for weeks, purple takes a minute—I really have to look—oh, the clouds in a painting of the sky, and I can breathe again. You are safe. You are here now. 

I call the dog in and she comes running, tail wagging, to greet me. 

 

I convince him to swallow the pill. It takes an hour.

First I am his wife. It will not hurt you, it will help you. Darling, sweetheart, baby, please.

Then I am his caretaker. I demand. He refuses and I am his wife again, begging: please, if you love me at all.

Finally, I am the villain. I will leave. I will call your mother. I will ship you to Texas. I can’t do this if you don’t take it. I can’t do this anymore.

Please, I love you.

He puts the pill on his tongue and takes a sip of water, and I make him open his mouth.

A wet, semi-dissolved white pellet falls out.

We cry together. Is it for him, this shell of a person? For myself, the desert that lives in my chest? Because I will have to do this again, and again, and again? 

We start over. I am wife, I am caretaker, I am villain.

When I beg him to do it so I can stay sane, he takes the pill.

 

In a cozy office in downtown Charlottetown, I tell my therapist about my three latest episodes where my wife does something innocuous and I can’t re-ground myself. My wife says “Okay” with a tone that sounds like him (when he would stonewall me for days at a time), and I go sob uncontrollably in the living room.

“I’ve never had dissociative episodes like this,” I say, squeezing a squishy fidget toy. She asks how it feels. “Unsafe.” 

It took a year after I left my ex-husband before I could call him a little bit abusive, and even now, I cushion it. I don’t say abuse very often, and never in relation to myself—abused—a word covered in crusty pieces of shame.

“It’s another layer of the onion,” my therapist says. “You’re further away and can examine it safely, so new things come up.” 

“I don’t want to be an onion.”

“Pick a different vegetable.” 

Fine, fine, an onion it is—peeling away big stinky layers, some rotting and mouldy, some crisp and fresh, some barely there at all. I wonder when I’ll finally hit the core. When I might be done. 

 

One night in November, I wake, skin hot and prickling. The room is that dark blue colour of past midnight, and my husband is staring at me. His eyes are someone else’s. He will kill me if I stay. 

Hiding in the bathroom, I listen to him lay down, wait until his breathing is smooth and even. The last time he woke me in the middle of the night was the first psychotic break, four months ago: he ran out with nothing, and I called the police. At the door, I armed myself with a can of wasp spray—we had a gun under the bed but I didn’t know how to use it. 

He told me yesterday Jesus loves me. I wonder if Jesus is the reason I wake in the morning at a friend’s house, her cat purring on my chest.

When I come home, he sobs at my feet. “It’s the meds,” he says, “I love you, I’m so sorry. You were taking up half the bed and I was just angry, I felt so angry.” 

I wonder if Jesus is the reason I am still alive.

 

At our favourite brewery, my wife says establishments should really have fruit fly traps; it’s gross how many are dive-bombing our beer. She waves one away, knocking an empty glass toward me. The flinch that comes is from the time it was a chair, a bunch of bananas, a cold beer in my lap, from the silences in the after. 

“I’m sorry,” I say through immediate tears, ducking my head. “That reminded me of how I used to get hurt by accident.” But I think of my ex-husband’s focus, how he would shove things but never directly at me, the way a hula hoop left a bruise on my cheekbone. Once a light fixture shattered above my head. For days, I found nicks and cuts all over my neck and shoulders. 

My wife holds out her hand, an invitation. 

“That’s because he wanted to hit you,” she says, gently, when I take it. “I’m never trying to hurt you.” 

“I know,” I say, tears lodged in my throat, “I know.” 

 

The end of January brings a three-day cold snap. The first day, I set the kitchen faucet to a steady drip that keeps me awake, staring at snow blanketing an unraked lawn. He sleeps through the tiny trills of water as I make tea in the dark. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, maybe a poem.

The second night it’s icy. He retreats into anger and I retreat into a fifth of whiskey. By bedtime, I’m drunk. I turn off the tap and move to the cracked leather couch, the cat curling up behind my knees. 

The next morning, my shower is lukewarm and he says the water heater’s busted, calling me to look. Outside, steaming liquid spills onto frosty ground beneath the house, the steady stream of a mistake.

 

Later that week, he asks me to bring home Post-its. Back in July, when this began, he’d only communicate in writing—the house is bugged, they’re listening—burning the notes after. Ashes floated around the house, coating the bottoms of my feet and sticking to the back of my throat. He’d snap his fingers if I spoke, shoving a pen into my hand.

They are listening. 

I keep forgetting to bring them home. For the next few days, I find pieces of old receipts taped around the house, to the shower and the sink and the sticky front door knob, stating what needs fixing.

 

Every photo I take in March is a still life: my favourite little clay teapot, a rack of lamb smothered in garlic and herbs, a potato growing out of the compost, a friend’s cat laying on my stomach. Hundreds of shots of beautiful clouds. Pink tulips, the first flowers he ever got me, artfully arranged in a stainless steel French press.

I record a video for a friend. I’m learning a new hula hoop trick, swinging two hoops in tandem around my body, a whirl of bright colours. I laugh when I mess up, lips pressing together in focus. Watching it, years later, I see how beautiful I look. The joy I take in small things.

 

In April, an old friend drives through town, so we meet up at a diner. It’s surreal to talk about my life, my work, my husband, as if all is normal and he did not, just the other day, tell me he wants off his meds again.

She tells her daughter not to lick the table and I laugh. 

“Things I never thought I’d say.” 

I tell her a version of the story I’m perfecting. Under five minutes, summed up nice and neat minus the part where he’s still not okay and neither am I. She listens as her daughter colours beside her. I’m careful: I say hospital, not mental hospital, I call it work stress, drape his drinking in metaphor. Under the table, she bumps her knee against mine. Friends since sixteen, she’s seen me in all phases, but this one feels like someone else’s fever dream.

“My husband scares me when he drinks,” she whispers, her daughter focused on the TV. “I had to lock myself in a bedroom with her once. He banged on the door for an hour.”

 

Our farmhouse overlooks a river. The dog sits in the middle of the yard, watching a flock of crows beyond the fence as if pondering life’s mysteries. Inside, my wife cooks. I take a picture: fried eggs, well-buttered toast, bacon from a local butcher, steam rising off a teacup.

“Pepper?” she asks, lifting the mill.

“Please.” 

While we eat, we enact what we call a thirty-minute date, where we don’t talk about work or hard things. For a moment we look at each other, unsure.

“Okay, truth or dare,” she says, reverting to an old staple from our early dates. 

“Truth.” 

“Favourite thing you’ve read lately?”

A poem, I tell her, about a silent retreat and how quickly the author forgot what they learned once back in normal life. I read it to her and we sit for a moment.

At her turn, she chooses dare.

“I dare you to come with me and Wynonna on a walk.” 

She groans, but she’s smiling, looking at our dog pouting on the couch. “Hard life I lead,” she says. 

 

For Beltane, I bake a fluffy white cake and slather it with whipped cream and berries. When our guests arrive, he disappears into the bedroom. 

Outside, I set up a table with flower crown materials, bubbly white wine, and a punch bowl with floating marigolds and pansies. We burn a big pile of brush, since Beltane celebrates fire and rebirth, after all. Once I’ve had at least a bottle and a half of wine, I break out the tarot cards. Our friend who always reads does mine last, and everyone gathers to listen. My husband has not emerged—every so often, I catch people glancing at the back door. 

My final card, which represents change, is Death: radical transformation, beginnings, end of a cycle. Someone gives a low whistle, another a soft laugh. We know what this is about. Instead of flushing with shame, I find myself hopeful.

She reads: “A part of oneself must be sacrificed to continue.”

 

For a few weeks, I try to reconnect with my husband. We listen to audiobooks, take walks, have date nights and play new board games. I buy new underwear and pretty bras. When I put some on and sit on the bed, he ignores me, as he has for months. 

“Is there… a reason why we aren’t having sex anymore?” I’m afraid of the answer. I already know it in the way he talks about other women, from his disinterest in the body positive movement I’ve found. 

“You’re losing your hourglass figure.” 

We stare at each other. I can’t believe he’s said it out loud, and I wonder how we will ever recover from this. 

I try to give him an out. Did you really mean that? Are you sure? I’m not nineteen anymore, but bodies change. 

“I don’t see why you’re so upset. I was just trying to be honest,” he says, walking away as I follow him from room to room. “It’s something you can change.” 

My vision goes white. I slam my hand down on the table, pain reverberating through my arm, and scream “Fuck you!” as loud as I can. 

 

I drag him to three therapists and tell them what he said and how he won’t apologize.

The first therapist understands why he wants to get off the medication, did we know there are natural ways to control psychosis? 

The second therapist understands that sex is based on physical attraction and he asks how we’re working to find that again. 

The last therapist asks him, “Do you see how your comment would be hard for her to move past?”

My husband crosses his arms. 

When we’re leaving, she asks me to stay for a question about billing, then hands me a printout when we’re alone: the Power and Control Wheel. Using intimidation, using emotional abuse, minimizing, denying, blaming. The word violence, in big bold letters printed around the wheel, pulses in my brain.

 

On a Wednesday, I text my friend before I go into the house: If you don’t hear from me in an hour, come check on me. I do box breathing, three of them, like the last therapist taught me. Inhale for four seconds, hold for four, exhale for four. 

Sitting at the table while he looms in the doorway, I open voice notes on my phone and hit record. Just in case. Finally: “I need you to move out. By the end of the month. You can get off the meds, that’s your choice, but you need to leave.”

He starts by begging. “Please don’t give up on us, please. Please please please.”

“Give up on what? What do we even have anymore?” 

His hands rise out of pockets, clenching.

“Who’s bolstering this?”

No one. Everyone. You. Me. I am dying. There is nothing left for me here. I have given you everything. 

 

In Prince Edward Island, living in a farmhouse with a rodent problem and a stunning water view, our dog lets us sleep in. My wife and I wake slowly, in a home we’ve built together, her palm resting neatly in the hollow between my ribs. It feels so perfect that I’m immediately heartbroken, as if I’ve already lost this moment. 

I ask if she wants to go to the beach. I bribe her with the promise of eating lunch out, maybe freshly fried fish and chips, some creamy seafood chowder and a buttery biscuit, where I know I’ll feed the dog a fry and she’ll look at us both disapprovingly. 

My wife hooks her foot around my leg, skin smooth and warm beneath the covers. “Maybe in a bit,” she says, and when the sleepy dog in our bed rolls over, we reach to pet her.