RECIPROCATION

Enough of the bullshit. Let me tell you about the most wonderful woman in my life, Mandi. My wife. Mother of my child. I owe my good fortune to her. All my tough decisions were made with her support. She's my guiding light. I don't know what I'd do without her. Perhaps only women are capable of such miracles. I know I am not.

Two days ago, I sat down to write, and my new typer ribbon wouldn't feed properly. It wouldn't strike. The threading would dislodge after only a few keystrokes. I was devastated, disillusioned. I shook my fist at the gods in disdain. I could no longer fight them, not with such a consistent lack of sleep, not with COVID-19 lurking the streets of Sacramento, the alleyways of my apprehension. I rolled up paper after paper in hopes that my typer would finally find its rhythm, but it did not. So, I took my glass of wine from the desk to the bed. I turned on Neil Young's “Fire and Rain”, drank, and began to cry.

When Alex finally went to bed, I left the bedroom and told Mandi all that had happened. She remained quiet as I said my piece ad nauseam.

“I’m too tired, baby. I can’t fight the gods any longer.”

I laid out my plan to her. I would give up the blog for a more fiction and poetry-centric website, a repository for material I believed in that was submitted to magazines but never published. I was dead set. The gods had killed my typer. They were killing me. They demanded silence, normalcy, and I told her so.

“Let's sleep on it.” she said.

The next morning, I tinkered with the typer, but the ribbon still would not feed. The spools wouldn’t sit flat in the shafts. They wobbled as they rotated, catching and misfiring as the hammer came down upon the page. I tore off their plastic top in classic, caveman-like fashion, but that only made matters worse as the ribbon now unraveled on its own at the top of the spool.

“Here. Let me try.” Mandi said from over my shoulder.

I felt offended by her request. I had been using this manual typer for over four years. How could she possibly fix it when I could not? I got up all the same and let her try. I drank the rest of my coffee through my teeth. It was over. Why couldn’t she just accept it?

Minutes later, Mandi stood up and said, “It’s fixed.”

I sat down in her place, and sure enough the ribbon fed properly, striking in perfect harmony with the hammer. The print came clean on the page, bolder than ever before.

I was taken aback. She had solved what appeared to me as an insurmountable problem, and she did it with a soft-spoken grace of which I could never master. She always called me passionate, but also a bull in a china shop. I pushed harder than most in one direction, but I lacked the patience necessary to avoid collateral damage.

I was ready to give it all up like I had so many times before.

“Baby, I’m a hack.”

“Baby, I’m a piece of shit.”

“Baby, you and Alex would be better off without me.”

She’s heard it all.

I even told her about those sleepless nights, years ago, sitting alone on the kitchen floor with a knife pressed to my jugular, laughing at my reflection in the dishwasher, at the Death I saw staring back at me. I wanted to go. I didn’t belong.

But, here came Mandi, filling the dark corners of my soul with warmth and light. Mandi, my hero, my savior, carrying me through the fires of nihilism at the expense of her own well-being. She has cried many a tear for my sake, and I hold a burgeoning guilt as a result. But she always bounces back. She always solves me… solves our problems in such a glorious fashion that an imbecile like me can’t help but watch in awe. It always seems impossible at first, but she finds a way each and every time.

She found a way with my typer too. Turns out there’s a small lever above the keys that controls the flow of ribbon from spool to spool. My bullheaded-ness would never have allowed me to see such a small solution, such a subtle salvation to the churning purgatory of my soul, but she did. She set this whole thing free yet again. The blog… hell, my life…

Later that night, I prayed to the gods, sardonically, yet truthfully, that I be given enough grace and good sense to reciprocate all that she has done for me.

“Oh, Nic,” they whispered in reply, “She’s far too strong for something like that.”

The damndest thing is, I agree with them. But, I’ll fight them all the same. She deserves nothing less.