Love is Forever

Boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, partner, there are a lot of names you call your significant other. Personally I prefer partner, because let’s face it that’s what the relationship is at its heart, a partnership. It’s a commitment to be a team forever, but what happens when it doesn’t work out? Well you could just walk away, but what if you couldn’t? I mean a partnership is forever, right?

Relationships are a lot like breaking in shoes. I know, but hear me out. You start off fitting close enough, but there are still parts of you that pinch the person and of course vice versa. After the years, you slowly find yourself molding to fit better. You learn better communication skills and each others quarks. Time seems to be the common denominator here, with enough time, and of course effort, things get better.

Or at least I wish they did. My partner is a collector, mostly of weird old dolls. They are a fan of the occult you see and have a deep fascination with basically anything and everything they can find. I’ll never understand it and for the most part I deal with it, but lately it’s gone overboard. Our house, which we agreed would remain clutter free when we bought it, has become littered with these dolls and other strange trinkets. I’m a fan of yearlong Halloween as much as the next person, but this is pushing it.

They’ve been acting strange too. Always spending late nights working on something in their office. Of course, when I ask I would get brushed off as if it were nothing. I hardly see them now and maybe that’s part of why I snapped. It’s odd how you can be in a partnership, but feel so alone. It turns out that even after all the years together, sometimes certain parts won’t ever fit together. In fact, sometimes they stab.

It was an accident. It was! And I will admit that I got scared afterwards, but I am going to tell the story in its completeness, I won’t lie to you. I was angry, I had been in the kitchen making lunch… alone… again. I was chopping onions and they were getting to me. I tripped over one of the stupid dolls and lost it. I am not a violent person and if you asked me I couldn’t tell you why I did it, but I ripped the doll to pieces, yelling obscenities the entire time.

Sometimes no matter how hard you try, you emulate your parents, or parent in my case. My partner came down and we got into a fight. There was yelling and cussing, then I was pushed back against the counter. I was hit and punched over and over. Don’t worry, I didn’t hit them back, I would never cross that line. I’m not that kind of person! Still, they slapped me and told I was worthless, less than nothing. They told me I was useless, that no one else was ever going to love me. Maybe they were right, but I never stopped to get clarification as I slid the knife into their chest.

It wasn’t even a conscious thought, it was a reaction borne out of pure and white hot anger. Do I regret it? Well, I did say we wouldn’t lie to each other, didn’t I? I was scared but occurred to me that in the entire world, only I knew what had just transpired. I also realized that people only get caught because they are in a hurry to dispose of the body, so I wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

The thick white plastic shower curtain from the third floor bathroom provided a way to keep the extra mess to a minimum. You don’t realize how much blood is in a person until it’s no longer in them. It also made it easier to transfer the body to the first floor bathtub. A rather large jetted tub, which would make for easy clean up afterwards, remember bleach hids all!

At this point I found a calm zen-like space and prepared the body for… disposal. I wasn’t about to be punished for something so accidental, why should I?! It was backbreaking and tedious work turning the my beloved’s corpse into pieces, but when I was done it was well past midnight. With the cover of darkness I moved the body to the trunk of the car.

Luckily even though we lived in the city, we weren’t far from country. It was going to be easy to dispose of them now. I hadn’t seen another car for almost an hour. No one was coming and no one would know. Digging a hole isn’t as easy as it looks. Maybe that’s why funerals always have a hole pre-dug. By the time I finished it was almost sunrise. However, I worked hard and the body would be buried deep enough that nothing would get to it. It could rot in peace and I could live unafraid of discovery.

No one saw me, no one said anything, and I arrived to an empty home! I don’t want to say I’m happy I did it, but I will admit I wasn’t sad either. I quickly disposed of most of my partners occult things. Not all of it, there was far too much for a single garbage can, but enough that I was hopeful things would be clutter free in no time. After a quick shower, fatigue started to set in. It had been a busy day, can you blame me? Some sleep was in order.

I had been awake over 24 hours at that point, but I don’t know how long I had slept. By the time I woke up it was night again. I was refreshed and relieved. The next couple of days I would just relax, then go on like nothing had happened. We were isolated from the world, no one would even miss them, least of all me. My thoughts were interrupted by my stomach, while I was busy with other… things, I had forgotten to eat.

Heading to the second floor kitchen I wondered if my lunch was still out and if it were still edible, but my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of banging in the kitchen. I was alone… wasn’t I?

When I reached the top of the stairs and looked towards the kitchen, it was the cat. I gave myself a heart attack for nothing! I realized I was on edge. I just needed to relax. As I walked over to make my meal I noticed that I had tracked dirt into the house. An amateur move on my part that I would rectify after some food.

Then I saw them, my formally alive partner walking around the kitchen island. Their movements were so animated and fitful they looked like a marionette. They were dead, I was sure if it. Yet they were standing, somehow in one piece, in the kitchen caked in dirt. My mouth went dry and suddenly the beating of my heart was deafening. Was I imagining this? All they did was watch me with their dead eyes. It must have been my imagination. t

Reality set it when they said, “That was fun, but now it’s your turn!”

I guess a partnership really is… forever.