The Lonesome Bodybuilder

There’s no need to live life just keeping up the appearance of being human.

In the darkness, my husband swiftly removed my pajama bottoms. When I thought about whether the thing that had started to move on top of me was my husband or just something like him, I felt a terrible dread and kept my eyes firmly shut. Then I felt skin slacken, and bodies start to yield, and then I could no longer tell whose sensations I was feeling. Snake ball! My body was starting to coil, and I tried to stop thinking by closing my eyes even more tightly. That only made the boundary between the skin of our entwined bodies even hazier. My husband the snake opened his mouth and swallowed me headfirst, and I desperately resisted his sticky, moist membranes, but soon the inside of his body became a pleasurable place to be. By then I was actively feeding my body to him to be devoured. He seemed to be enjoying eating me up so much that the sensation of it spread to me, and I felt as though I were tasting my own self.

“It’s because you’re a housewife, San. You can’t understand how men don’t want to have to think about things when we get home.”

Men entered into me through my roots like nutrients dissolved in potting soil. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace.

Whenever I’d gotten close to someone in the past, I’d had the feeling that little by little I was being replaced. The other person’s ideas, interests, and habits would gradually take the place of my own. Every time I noticed myself acting as though that was who I’d been all along, a chill went up my spine. The fact that I couldn’t stop, even if I tried, was proof that it wasn’t actually a matter of anything as benign as acting or pretending.

I think that’s the image I have of marriage—that both me and the other person, as we are now, will disappear before we can do anything about it. But I guess that can’t be right. I think?”

“No, it’s not like that. I’m not sure why. Maybe I don’t really know, myself. But I’d like us to stay as separate people for a little longer.”

“Separate people?”

“I mean, getting married, that means swallowing everything about the other person, the good things and the bad. What if there ends up being more of the bad? You’d both be in trouble then, wouldn’t you?” Hakone said.

“Do you think he’s still getting them? The weird garbled messages?”

“Probably.”

“Has he said?”

“No, but you can just tell these things sometimes.”

How had I ended up married to a completely different species of being from me?

Each time I looked at my husband lying on the couch, I had the strange impression I was living with a new kind of organism that would die if it exerted itself in any way.