MAN
Two mirrors
We are in our bathroom, standing in front of the two mirrors, cleaning our teeth with dental floss and using toothbrushes.
– Look at my toothbrush – she says.
So I look.
– Now… at yours.
I glance at it not too keen to admire that spotlessly clean object that looks as it has been just purchased. My tool is dirty, worn out just as I am. I do not feel like carrying on with brushing. She is taking her time fighting bacterias, scale, decay, showing off , making sure I have learned the lesson well.
The fight is over. We are standing next to each other thinking, what is next to come. I can see my face in the mirror – sad, miserable eyes and I am trying to smile, but can only come up with a wry look.
My mirror – permanently splashed with tooth paste. Hers – shinny and clean. She can set her eyes on a women in her forties, I am facing the guy just under fifty, although we are both the same age.
My nightly routine of shaving before going to bed…. It had become a habit, when we longed for making love in a fanciful, inventive way. She would complain about my rough beard on her smooth skin, especially on this fine surface, somewhere close to the archway of the earthly paradise. Good, old times.
She has surely spotted me shaving and is just about to blow up. I bet she is thinking : „ Not again ! These bedroom eyes… Sex is the only activity he can think of. What a berk! I cannot stand someone who is so annoying, obnoxious and piggish, who on purpose makes so much noise, and – on top of that – misses the toilet and splashes at the seat, keeps shouting at kids, always buys cheap, scratchy toilet paper, and when planting in my garden does not put plants deep enough wasting both – time and money. Who is unable of hanging the laundry properly. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he does manage to play havoc with my life”.
She is rinsing her mouth so I keep mine shut. It might be the best thing to do as my single remark can get on her nerves and add fuel to the fire. I am aware of her gargling. Without stopping she moves towards the toilet and sits down just as if she was alone. I still hear the nasty sound coming from her mouth. We have to put up with this annoying time in our life when anything goes. She knows for sure that I am at the end of my tether. Watching her nude sitting on a toilet seat and taking a pee has always killed off my desire for sex and titillating fantasizing. She couldn’t care less knowing how to put me down.
Her urine is twitting. She reaches to get a tissue. A woman taking a pee looks like a lady holding a white flower in her fragile hand. That image lasts only for a moment and the delicate petal will be defiled in the blink of an eye.
Will she wait till I leave or is she going to finish this pathetic performance right now? If she is planning to to end this show in front of me, I am going downstairs to watch porn on TV.
She uses the paper with great show of panache not even looking at me. Then her tongue pushes the water out of her mouth in a big, loud spit, straight to the washbasin.
I am not in the mood for watching. I have enough of this so I am going to bed to dive into a warm, soft and restful den of my duvet’. Only there I feel cozy, safe and sound.
Yet there were no signs that it would end like this…… No! That is not true. I have been fooling myself for years. There had been certain warnings and tips that the wheels were just about to come off our marriage. But..they had been so vague and elusive, obviously seen as not believable. There were in the past some lingering doubts in my mind, but at that time I had never had the feeling that by getting married I was shooting myself in the foot. I think that this was the way people used to learn about the world wars. There had been so many clear indications and so much evidence of violence and barbarity, and no reaction to those facts just stupid naivety. It has been the same time after time. That is how we could fall into the pitfall of the third world war – no more mobiles, no computers, the net will go blank. The whole world will vanish.
So far, our war is only the domestic one, but this is the worst kind of it. There is a knife between Cain and Abel. If there was a wall made of tissue between love and hate it could be pierced through by the tip of a tongue.