The Precarious Couple

Sarah Meirose

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Stephen curls an arm around me in bed. Sweet. Intimate. Half-sleeping touch. I almost drift off completely when suddenly I am too hot. I cannot breathe. In an instant, all that matters is that I get out, escape his hold. I bolt from bed and crumple to the carpet, sobbing. Stephen perches on the very edge of my bed, not sure how to help, not sure what is happening. Not sure if it is his fault or not. Without a word, he slips from the room and my panic rises—He’s leaving me he’s leaving me I can’t believe he’s leaving me like this crying on the floor goddamn it come back please come back please don’t leave me—

He returns with a glass of water in one hand and my cat, Noodle, under his other arm. He waits silently while I sip, stop crying, scratch Noodle behind her ears. She purrs and rubs her forehead against my chin.

“Breathe,” he whispers. He raises a hand questioningly, asking via half-completed gesture if he may touch me. I nod, and he begins to rub circles between my shoulders. “You’re okay.” I cry harder. “You’re gonna be okay. It’s okay.”

“I’m so sorry.” The words trip on a wet sob and stumble into the room.

“You don’t have to apologize.” He kisses the top of my head; I lean into him. “Do you want to talk about it at all?” I try to answer but none of the sentences come out right. “We don’t have to. We can go back to bed. Or you can take the bed and I can sleep on the couch if you want. Or I can go back to my place, too, if that’d be better.”

“No,” I finally look at him, “please stay with me.” I set the empty water glass on the floor and Noodle curls up in my lap. “I don’t know what to say, I’m just…embarrassed.”

“Why?”

“I mean, I freaked out for no reason.” A long pause. “No, there is a reason, I just don’t like what it is.” He wipes a tear from my cheek but his hand freezes when I say, “The last person to hold me like that was Tyler.”

***

Tyler and I met in the summer of 2018, during my first night working in a downtown café no more than a mile from my graduate school. As soon as we got together, our coworkers (including Stephen) had endless criticisms. According to them, Tyler was a screw-up, a bad man, and an even worse partner. He had a habit of being late for work, he drank too much, and he had no direction for his life. Other criticisms, which I refuse to reiterate here, were based on stereotypes of Natives. I defended him against everyone. Still, the workplace consensus was that I could do better, that I was “too smart to be acting this stupid.” And to him, they asked, “How’d you land someone like her?” or said, “She deserves better than you.” A month in, I think people realized we were serious about each other, and then their warnings changed from “Be careful around him” to “You know you can’t fix him.” The kitchen crew’s attitude about our relationship now reflected their belief that he cannot be saved—or is not worth “saving”—and that trying to do so would only harm me.

But when I was with Tyler, I did not see him as a series of problems to be fixed. The more I got to know him, the more I valued him as a whole person. I did not just like specific things about him—I believe if you only like certain things about a person, then you can like them in other people too, and then your loved one is replaceable. But if you love them as a whole person, they are irreplaceable. The more I knew him, the more irreplaceable he became. He was not a project to me, but the comments made about us were, I think, a common criticism of what I have now come to call “the precarious couple.”

The precarious couple—a concept of my own design I teased out from reading Judith Butler in graduate school. In a precarious couple, one partner’s life is (or both partners’ lives are) caught in the “exclusionary conceptions” of normative humanity which Butler notes in Precarious Life (2006). Some lives are livable, others are not. I knew my friends just wanted the best for me, but I was reminded again of Butler: “Our fear of understanding a point of view belies a deeper fear that we shall be taken up by it, find it is contagious, and become infected in a morally perilous way by the thinking of the presumed enemy.”¹ They were afraid that if I got too close to him, whatever was “wrong” with him would in turn affect or infect me.

A number of things made my life and Tyler’s life precarious. My status as a queer woman, a sexual assault and domestic violence survivor. Tyler’s status as a Native American and a childhood abuse survivor. Although both our lives are jeopardous in a social system made by and for white, heteronormative, untraumatized men, Tyler’s life was more precarious than my own on the grounds that I am still white, and my whiteness protects my life from being made impossible in ways that Tyler’s indigeneity does not—and cannot.

That pain cannot be pushed away. We deal with it as best we can. Butler asserts that when a precarious life ends, the life “cannot be mourned because they are always already lost, or, rather, never ‘were.’”² Human but not human. Alive but dead. Lost but found. What a former therapist of mine called an ambiguous loss, when “people are perceived as physically absent but psychologically present [or] physically absent but psychologically present.”³ In theories of ambiguous loss, it is impossible to move on or “properly” grieve because there is never any confirmation that the lost person has died. Either their body is still here but their mind is gone, or their body is gone but one feels their presence everywhere. This loss theory tangles into Butler’s discussion of precarity through its reliance on ambiguity—if someone whom we do not consider human dies, we do not have a clear, prescriptive method to mourn them. A livable life ends in a grievable death, and a precarious life is never seen as truly human, truly alive at all, so there is no death. There is no grief, no mourning. No moving forward.

***

When school started again in the fall, I taught Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) in my Introduction to Literature class. Everyone wanted to write about Septimus. I taught Butler alongside Woolf—Septimus lives a precarious life because of his status as a World War I veteran, and his shellshock is misdiagnosed and mistreated by his physicians. And as a veteran, Septimus’ living body represents a war that many Londoners like Clarissa Dalloway would much rather think of as being finished— “over; thank Heaven—over.”⁴ His precarious life makes his marriage to Lucrezia a precarious couple.

In our discussions, we came up against a worrisome (and somewhat Foucauldian) thought: the idea of the resting cure, being sent to the country, isolated, “where we will teach you how to rest.”⁵ Septimus must be sent away from the city not just to remove the reminder of the war or to normalize his symptoms—note: no one seems interested in getting to the root of the matter, just getting him to stop behaving “abnormally”—but to also extract from society a perceived threat. If Septimus’ mental health makes him precarious, the lives of those around him become precarious, too, because of their proximity to him. If they get too close, whatever is “wrong” with him will affect them. They will not forget the War. They will not move forward. They, too, will become lost. As we read, it becomes increasingly clear to us that Dr. Holmes cares more for how Septimus’ behavior makes Lucrezia feel than he does for actually treating what causes Septimus’ behavior. Of course, my students and I discussed that in the early 20th century, physicians did not possess the same comprehension of mental health that we do today, but the stigma remains the same. If the ill person cannot behave “normally,” then the conceptions of normative humanity exclude them, and they must be removed.

In late September, my students’ hearts broke for Septimus. One young woman introduced to our class the concept of the “Impossible Task,” what she described as a symptom of depression in which the ill person comes up against something insurmountable. This task could be something new, or something the depressed person has done many times. Impossible tasks, she explained, may range from brushing one’s teeth, speaking in public, or even getting out of bed in the morning. We agreed that Septimus’ life is cluttered by impossible tasks, for example, when the car backfires and Septimus is “weighted there, rooted to the pavement,” thinking, “It is I who am blocking the way.”⁶

Not only does this thought reveal Septimus’ confrontation with an Impossible Task (taking a step forward), but it also shows readers how, on a grander scale, Septimus’ living body prevents the world from moving forward and forgetting the war. I shared my student’s “Impossible Task” theory with my next class, and one young man responded: “What if just living in general becomes his Impossible Task? How can he go on when going on at all seems undoable?” I did not want to spoil the novel for them, but I did not want to let the question go unanswered. We took it this way: a precarious life is one which exists between two states of being, so what must happen for Septimus to feel he has no other option, no viable exit from this liminal state other than potentially killing himself? The student answered, “If he’s both, then he’s also neither. So, I guess it would take something that makes him fully believe that he doesn’t belong in either anymore, or that he isn’t wanted by anyone in either place.”

The tragedy of the First World War was that none of the young boys who fought in it absolutely had to die; these were children sent to clean up adults’ messes. Septimus did not have to die, and he even thinks, before jumping onto the iron rail, “He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings—what did they want?”⁷ We spent ages on that one question. I told my students that I read the novel eight times, and I still had not figured out what exactly he means. But we were devastated by Septimus’ use of “they” to describe “human beings.” He sees humanity as they, not we or us. Despite enjoying the same things humans do, even something as simple as the heat of the sun, he recognizes his excluded position, and that living a precarious life is the ultimate Impossible Task. In a system that makes his life impossible, his suicide is then figured as freedom, an escape, and a victory instead of a crushing defeat.

***

On Thursday night of homecoming week, an aerosol can of cooking spray exploded in the café’s kitchen. My best friend, Brock, was closest to the explosion and was badly burned on his right arm. Tyler had left the café to work with his roommate Josh at a steakhouse around the block, and we were also in our third break-up, so we were surprised to see one another downtown that night. Almost every member of Brock’s kitchen staff came out to see him, investigate his bandages, buy him drink after drink, and watch the security footage of the explosion he saved to his phone.

Brock was my sole focus. We watched the explosion video too many times to count; I brought him fresh gauze and bandages; I spoke for five minutes straight about the importance of the Vitamin E supplements I brought him—“You can even crack them open and rub the gel into the burn once it’s closed, it’ll help prevent scarring.” The few times Tyler and I did make eye contact, he seemed envious of the attention Brock received from me. I left the bar around ten o’clock and went home.

I woke up at half past five because my phone was ringing. Tyler. His voice stumbled through the phone: “I made a mistake. I need you.” And at first, I thought, fuck off with your booty call. But then I heard how hard he worked to keep his voice steady when he said—begged—“Please. Please, I need your help. I made a mistake.” Something was wrong. I told him I needed to shower, but that if he could come pick me up in twenty minutes, I would stay with him until I taught at noon. My students were almost to the point of discussing Septimus’ suicide in Mrs. Dalloway; I packed the novel in my purse. When we climbed the porch steps to his house, every logical brain cell begged me to turn around and go home. But when I was growing up, everyone always said that love is not logical. Was it love that won when I opened the door and followed him into the dark?

When Tyler removed his coat, I saw seven shallow, fresh cuts on his left arm. Self-inflicted. At first, he pulled his arm away when I reached for it, but he eventually let me guide him to the bathroom and clean the cuts. The lights were too bright, the water landed loudly in the sink. We did not—maybe we could not—speak. I was almost finished putting on bandages when Tyler leaned in and kissed me; he tasted like sweet red wine and I felt sick. “I love you,” he slurred the words out for the first time. We stood there for a long moment, his forehead resting against mine, and then I led him to bed.

Tyler never indicated an interest in much of what I studied, but he knew I wrote about him often. He knew what I was teaching and sometimes asked me to read passages or poems to him—he loved how I read. All I had that morning was Mrs. Dalloway. He asked me to read a few Septimus pages. I flipped to the scene where Septimus was haunted by visions of Evans answering his song “from behind the tree…no mud was on him; no wounds; he was not changed.” I did not tell him how much he reminds me of Septimus, even when Tyler said, “I found my friend Zach after he shot himself. Sometimes I don’t want to go to sleep because I know I’ll see him…like that.” I held his hand, waited for him to fall asleep. Then I slipped outside into the brisk October air and cried. I cried but I wanted to scream.

The day after I cleaned Tyler’s self-inflicted wounds, I discussed with a peer Walt Whitman’s poem “Wound-Dresser,” pausing at the lines: “I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.”⁹ I wished more than anything I could carry Tyler’s pain for him. Let me take it. Let me be the one to bear it so he would not be hurting this badly anymore. The open cuts on Tyler’s wrist were “a physical loss” that also erased “familiar signs of personality and selfhood.”¹⁰ Something happened to my partner that I did not know about and likely could not fully understand; whatever pain led him to the point of cutting, I would not be able to heal, no matter how much I wished it so. Robert Leigh Davis writes that dressing a wound “rescues [the body] from the incoherence and ‘utter strangeness of the wound.’”¹¹ I thought back to the bathroom—the blood as thin as water when it swirled toward the drain, gently pressing disinfectant wipes against the open cuts—and I do not know if I agree with Davis on this point. Nothing seemed coherent in that cramped space.

I wrote poetry about Tyler in fits and starts; every time I come back to the blood, this refrain does not comfort me. While his blood and mine looks the same, mine was not washed down the bathroom sink. My blood was not spilled because of an injury only I could see. If the wound-dresser’s work rescues the patient from the incoherence of his wounds, why was my partner still so lost? And why was I?

***

Two weeks passed, so many I-love-you texts sent and received. I read Tyler poems by Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, and Tennyson. Whoever I was reading, whoever I was teaching, he wanted to hear. We did not see one another in person very often during the week, as our jobs kept us on opposite schedules. The Saturday before Halloween, I met him at a bar downtown after seeing A Star Is Born. I arrived in tears, fresh off watching Bradley Cooper’s character, Jackson Maine, commit suicide by hanging. I told him how Maine’s dog was waiting at the door for him, how I felt I could not catch my breath during the sequence, how I held hands with the stranger beside me, the only other person in the theater. He put one hand over mine on the bar, and I saw the edge of a flexible bandage sticking out from under his sleeve. I waited until we were back at his house to let him know what I had seen. I stepped out on the porch and Tyler followed me; he sat on a chair in the corner and shone his phone’s flashlight on the floorboards. I know a bloodstain when I see it. This one was at least fourteen inches around, dark, not cleaned up very well.

“Is this yours?” Before he could answer, I said, “Pull up your sleeve.”

He hesitated, hand on cuff. “Are you sure?”

I tried to keep my voice steady. “Pull up your sleeve.” He did, revealing a wrap around his left wrist. There was gauze underneath. “How bad is it?”

Tyler unwound the bandage, removed the gauze. “I almost don’t want you to see it.”

“I can handle it.” A dark scar ran across his wrist; above and below it was a pair of slightly lighter, thinner scars from stitches. It looked like a sewn-shut mouth.

As though he could predict my next question, Tyler said, “A couple nights after you came over. That Monday right after. It was—” he searched for the words— “I wasn’t okay.”

There was only one chair on the porch; I sat on his lap. “Why didn’t you tell me?” His right hand rubbed circles between my shoulders. “Why wouldn’t you tell me? You know I would’ve been there.”

“Nobody was supposed to know.” Tyler rested his forehead against mine. “Especially not you.” A quick kiss, then, “I promise I’m all right now.” I remembered, vaguely, what Nietzsche wrote about promises, how making a promise is the closest we can get to predicting our future. Tyler predicted a future where he could be happy, healthy, healed. But I looked forward and all I felt was fear. Tyler’s self-harm relapse almost crippled him. He cut so deep into his wrist that he nearly lost use of his left hand. When he thought I could not see him, he made a fist, held it tight, then opened it, flexing his fingers wide; he winced every time.

This was not the first time Tyler tried to take his own life. On our first date, I noticed long, vertical scars up both his arms; I asked him about them, and he answered honestly, “I tried to kill myself four years ago.” The morning after I first stayed the night, I watched him shave and I saw similar scars on his neck—I said nothing, but the angle and length of the scars indicated that they were also self-inflicted: he had once tried to cut his throat. I saw his scars, old and new, and I knew that I would outlive the man I loved. I would outlive him by decades, a realization made all the more terrifying by the fact that the universe does not have a special signal to let any of us know when we are seeing for the very last time.

***

At the start of A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis writes, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”¹² In re-reading, I learned that I was not just afraid of losing Tyler; I mourned him as though he was already lost. I loved a ghost. It was through my proximity to his precarious life that I was confronted again and again with my own precarity. I lost myself in a deep depression; I could not write, I stopped singing, I barely ate. For the first time in a decade, I cut myself, using a pocketknife I received as a birthday present. I withdrew from all but one of my graduate seminars; even though I could keep up with the reading, when I sat to write my weekly response paper, I could not focus enough to pull together the required two pages. I began to fear for my status in the graduate program: if I could not write even two pages, how was I supposed to sit a comprehensive exam and complete a thesis? I looked to Precarious Life once again:

It is not as if an “I” exists independently over here and then simply loses a “you” over there, especially if the attachment to “you” is part of what composes who “I” am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who “am” I, without you…I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well.¹³

It was because of my bond, my proximity to Tyler’s precarity that I felt this way. As witness to his suffering, I suffered, too. And I was so curious about Lucrezia, and her role as witness to Septimus’ death. After Dr. Holmes gives her a sweet tonic and she falls asleep, we do not hear from her again for the rest of Woolf’s novel. Her “you” has gone missing, and so we lose her “I” as well. Her grief reduces her to speechlessness. What future awaits her? I had no answers for these questions, and I became angrier every day. I drank more. I continued to cut myself. I read and I read all my books about grief—every sentence, every shot, every shallow cut became another brick in the wall I felt like I kept hitting my head against. Nothing I did felt right. Nothing felt good enough. For the first time in a very long time, I felt useless.

In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes asks, “How does a love end?”¹⁴ My friend Ryne married her partner just after Thanksgiving; they said, “Until death do us part” in their vows, so is that it? Death parted Septimus and Lucrezia; death parted C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman—so “everything works out, but nothing lasts.”¹⁵ I wish Woolf allowed us to see Lucrezia mourn. If I could have just seen Rezia cry, to send what Barthes calls “the ‘truest’ of messages, that of [her] body, not that of [her] speech.”¹⁶ I wanted her to see her husband’s body, to scream, to attend his funeral, to break something, to continue beyond a single day in London. Maybe then I would have known what to do. But “such is love’s wound: a radical chasm (at the roots of being) which cannot be closed.”¹⁷ I lost and mourned my “you” daily; will I lose my “I,” too?

***

Pauline Boss describes the turning point in experiencing an ambiguous loss as the moment when we “temper our hunger for mastery [and] give up trying to find the perfect solution. We must redefine our relationship to the missing person. Most important, we must realize that the confusion we are experiencing is attributable to the ambiguity rather than to something we did—or neglected to do.”¹⁸ So comes my turning point.

The first weekend in December, Tyler called me late Saturday night and invited me over to hang out with him and his roommates, Buck and Josh. I drove over in the snow. When I walked into the house, I could tell that I was walking into something tense. It reminded me of when I was a child, living on the East Coast; we would occasionally get hurricanes and I liked to stand outside when the eye passed over. The pale light, the wet air, and the knowledge that this was a single moment of peace, that something bad was not quite finished.

Josh and I got along famously; when we were together, the conversation and laughter never stopped. But that night, he was so withdrawn. Tyler was asleep on the couch, so I asked Josh what was wrong. He took a shot of peach Svedka before saying, “He and I got in a fight earlier.”

“Like…an argument, or like a fight-fight?”

“It started out as just an argument about work, and then he went to sleep. But when he woke up, he was just in a complete rage. He got in my face and he…” Josh started to cry.

“What did he do?”

“He tried to choke me.”

“He what?” I moved to sit beside him. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Buck pulled him off me. Then he called you and, well, here we are.”

I took Josh’s hand. “I’m so sorry.” I was upset and angry; I looked at Tyler asleep on the couch. If Josh did not sound so afraid, I almost would not believe it. I was about to speak again when Tyler woke up.

“Don’t lie to her.” He stood up. “Don’t believe him.” He towered over us; Josh recoiled further back into his chair, but I stood up, cautiously positioning myself between the two men. Suddenly his hand was on my shoulder, and he pushed me out of the way. He moved closer to Josh, and when I realized they were about to continue their fight, I pulled Tyler away. They pushed one another, they yelled, Josh threw a bottle, I heard it shatter against the farthest wall, and I was right between them. I reached for Tyler; he grabbed my hand by the pinky finger, bending it backwards as he shoved me out of the way. One tried to hit the other, but I could not tell which direction it came from; stuck in between them, I took the punch in my side, but I barely felt it. It all seemed to last forever, but then time sped forward again when Josh and I fell back on the couch, and Tyler fell into the corner. I stood up quickly, putting myself directly between them again.

“Sarah, you need to leave.” Tyler struggled to stand up. He closed his hand. Flexed his fingers.

“Or what?” I closed my fist; my hand hurt badly. The room fell deadly silent. “If I’m leaving, I’m taking Josh with me.” And for the next few minutes, nobody spoke. We were so still, staring at one another. I was furious; Josh was frightened; Tyler…the only word I could think of to describe him in that moment was that he seemed humbled. I looked over my shoulder at Josh. “Are you all right?” He nodded.

The fight was over, and I knew in that moment, Tyler and I were done, too. I steered them both to the bathroom and cleaned blood from their hands, watched the night’s incoherence swirl down the drain. I put Josh to bed, and then I sat up the rest of the night with Tyler. I was quiet enough for him to realize something was wrong. He was so gentle when he took me in his arms, when he kissed me. I started crying. He kissed me again and again, and each time I wanted to crawl out of my skin and go die in the corner. But I let him kiss me, because that queasy feeling in my gut was, at last, the universe sending me a sign that this was the last time I could let myself see him. He wrapped his arms around me. I felt too hot; I could barely breathe. But I stayed. I made myself stay for just one more minute.

***

I took up other partners after Tyler. Never serious, never lasting more than a couple of weeks. I drifted from person to person while I tried to heal, until late March the next year, when I settled into something comfortable with Stephen. I finally started writing about the catastrophic failure of my relationship with Tyler, and Stephen read all the rough pages. He never offered criticism, he just…absorbed.

One morning while I was writing, he asked me, “How did you make sense of all of this?”

My simple answer: “I haven’t.” I showed him my commonplace book, overflowing with passages from Barthes, Butler, Lewis, and Woolf. I pointed him to the section on grief in my home library—I told him about the difference between bereavement (a situation), grief (an emotion), and mourning (an expression).¹⁹ Stephen was more patient with me than I thought I deserved, especially since Tyler was still everywhere for me, hovering over the new relationship like the eye of a storm.

Tyler lived on in photographs: Roland Barthes describes sorting through his deceased mother’s belongings: “Began the day by looking at her photographs. A cruel mourning begins again (but had never ended). To begin again without resting. Sisyphus.”²⁰ I looked through Polaroids I took of Tyler and wondered if Lucrezia will go back to that room, close the window, and sort through Septimus’ papers. Does she see him everywhere? When she goes to sleep alone, will she leave room in bed for him?

He lived on in clothing: Judith Butler writes that “One does not always stay intact,” and that we are “undone” even by “the prospect of the [other’s] touch, by the memory of the feel.”²¹ I have one of Tyler’s shirts and a sweater—I was once undone by how they smelled like him. Now I wore them so often I am undone by how much like me they smell instead. In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes articulates a “power” from the loved being which affects “everything it comes in contact with, even if only by a glance.”²² I felt that power everywhere—whenever it snowed, I wondered if Tyler had been outside yet to see it.

***

C. S. Lewis writes in A Grief Observed,

You never know how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn’t you then first discover how much you really trusted it? The same with people.²³

I believed Tyler would never hurt me long before I discovered how much I really trusted him not to. I never saw him like that before, so angry, so ready to attack his best friend, who he told me (so many times) that he loved. I kept looking to Mrs. Dalloway, to Septimus and Lucrezia as a model for my experience, but Lucrezia never had to make a decision like mine. Of course, Septimus’ precarity and her proximity to it frightened her, but she did not think about leaving him. She stayed, a dutiful witness, right to the very end.

But I must also remember that Septimus did not hit her. Lucrezia was never in a bind like mine. In “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” Judith Butler articulates the ethical quandary posed by the entanglement of precarity and proximity:

This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any individual sense of self. It is not as discrete individuals that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. This is also, clearly, the condition of my injurability as well, and in this way my answerability and my injurability are bound up with one another.²⁴

Proximity increases my precarity by tethering me to a person whom I love and who has power to hurt me physically, emotionally. That I might be injured by not only losing him but also by keeping him under these conditions is, of course, just cause for fear and for grief. Butler would likely say our bond has thinned out, but that the thread is not yet broken, that I am to be stuck in my responsibility to someone who, though he “may frighten me and threaten me,” I still loved, and to whom “my obligation…remain[s] firm.” ²⁵ This made me even angrier. Why should I answer if he calls? If I am frightened and threatened by him, I ought to owe him nothing. But still, I am torn apart by Barthes’ question: “Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you love [them] less than you thought…”²⁶

I love theory. I love Barthes, Lewis, Butler. I love my books and my philosophies and all the answers they illuminated in my studies and in my teaching. But for the first time I found myself facing down a problem that no theory could help me solve. Theory was failing me. It did not help. I was surrounded by books written by people much smarter than I might ever be, and yet I felt dumber and more alone than ever before.

***

Stephen and I eventually make it back into bed. He goes to put an arm around me but hesitates—the gesture withers as we lay beside one another, fingertips touching in the empty stretch of sheet between us. I keep apologizing for my panic attack because I do not know what else to say. Noodle jumps up on the bed and curls up between us, like a child settling in to sleep between her parents.

“Really, Sarah, it’s fine.” He rolls onto his side so he can look at me. I stay staring at the ceiling.

“I just feel stupid.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s been months, and I’m still so caught up on this.”

Stephen frowns a little. “You loved him.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you were stupid for that.”

I turn on my side to look at him. I struggle to get the next words out; I start crying again. “I just—”

“What is it?”

“Sometimes I wish he would have...” I felt like I was choking on the words. “If he did something truly bad, if he hit me on purpose, if he really was a bad man…maybe it’d be easier. I feel like I would know what to do with that.”

In the morning, though, Stephen behaved as if the entire conversation and panic attack had never happened. He started kissing me, and then pulled my underwear to the side and suddenly pushed himself in. It hurt and I said stop, pushed him away. He pulled out, and I thought he got the message, but then he started over again. And again. And again. I kept saying stop, then I started crying, and finally after about twenty minutes, he crawled off of me and left my apartment, leaving behind nothing but a whispered “I guess morning sex isn’t your thing.” There was something cruel in his words, a poorly suppressed disappointment. I rolled over to face the wall, but I could not fall back to sleep.

I cancelled my two sections of composition. I tried to eat around noon, but I had no appetite. I did not let myself fully realize it at the time, but I was in pain. My being at a loss for words, my inability to think clearly or write a single sentence for class (again). For days, I felt ill. All I could think about was that morning with Stephen, and I wracked my brain to understand why I was so fixated on it, why it killed my appetite, why I could not bear to be touched even by my best friend Brock. It took all my strength to not slip into my own old self-harm habits, and to keep up my three-month sobriety.

But that was all I could bear to do: keep myself sober and alive. I could not write—pain truly does destroy language—and I improvised my teaching since I could not fathom a way to turn reading assignments into lesson plans. I returned to my former therapist in town and told her what happened. She called it a “rape” before I did. For days after, I still refused to use the word; I think it was because I could not believe something like that happened to me again.²⁷ I replayed the incident in my mind so many times, focusing on the specific images I could remember: a wrinkle in the pillowcase; my hand on his chest, pushing him back, fingers flexed; the stretched fabric of my underwear as he pulled them to the side. Images of an atrocity committed against my body. Susan Sontag says we should let “atrocious images haunt us…they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.”²⁸ I never fixated on Tyler and Josh’s fight the way I did Stephen’s assault. I barely remember anything about the fight itself, only that it happened, and I jumped in the middle and got hurt by mistake. I believe Tyler never meant to hurt me—but Stephen did. He heard me cry, saw me in pain, and he did not stop.

***

What remains when the precarious couple does eventually separate permanently? No more hours-long phone calls, no more late-night drives. No more twisted sheets and blood-stained floorboards. Tyler and I drifted back together again in the fall of 2019. We were both in therapy, had our medications properly sorted out, and things between us felt…better. Less precarious, perhaps. We were growing together. I was teaching as an adjunct professor, and he was up for a major promotion at his restaurant. Just before Thanksgiving, I realized my period was late. I took an at-home test. Then another. And a third. All positives. I wanted to wait to tell him until I also had a positive test from my doctor—definitive, tangible proof that our precarious lives were headed somewhere stable, someplace safe—but Tyler sleuthed it out on his own. There was uncertainty at first, which I expected given that we were still waiting for my doctor to call us back, but then one afternoon—

“If you lose your family’s insurance when you turn twenty-six next year, what would we do about the baby?”

I looked up from my lesson plan. “I could probably get insurance through the school. Or if I’m in the PhD program then, I think they have student plans. And lots of the other candidates have kids, so the school probably has plans I could get the baby on, too.”

“I guess that could work.”

“Why, what’s up?” I closed my computer. He held out his hand, inviting me to bed.

“Well…I have great insurance through the tribe and my family. If we got married, I could get you on my plan.” The clock ticked louder and louder while I tried and failed to start a sentence. Then Tyler said, “You’re already my family. We’d just be making it official.”

“And adding a person.”

He smiled sleepily. “And adding a whole new person.”

The weeks passed; we were happy. I wrote my final lesson plans before exams started. My doctor confirmed: You’re having a son. I bought two new journals: one for wedding planning, another for documenting pregnancy and making a birth plan. But Midwestern winters are famously unkind. It was the morning of my students’ final exam review when I fell on black ice in the parking lot outside my office. I knew immediately that something was wrong. I cancelled the exam review, claiming I was ill, and rushed home.

The movies make it seem like it is barely noticeable. Like it passes quickly, like it does not hurt. A woman wakes up in hospital with foggy memories and only a phantom ache. Maybe she was in a car accident. Maybe she was thrown from a horse. But she cries so quietly; her stoic husband, a bedside sentinel, holds her hand. They go home the same day, together, somehow stronger for their loss.

But I screamed, bent double, hands to my stomach: I must keep myself, keep us together. And I was alone. Tyler was out of town with family, nearly all my friends were hours away from leaving for the holidays.

How do I tell him, tell anyone, that I watched our son die for six days?

***

Recall the bond that Butler would argue still exists, thinned but not broken. I wrote previously that although it angered or frightened me, my obligation to Tyler would remain firm, and that I would always answer his call. But after the miscarriage, neither of us really knew what to do with our pain. It alarmed me that what might separate our precarious lives was, in the end, not our individual precarity or our proximity to each other’s precarity, but rather the incoherence of a new ambiguous loss: our son, who never had a name, or a shape we could hold or point to and say, “There he was.” How might we grieve a child who never lived? When what made his life unlivable was neither war nor wound, not either of his parents’ lives or the circumstances of his own—but a common accident?

We blamed ourselves, and then we blamed each other. We tore at our bond until, on New Year’s Eve 2020, Tyler told me he was seeing someone else. He left me that same night, alone with my grief and our empty bed in a dark apartment and the baby blanket that would never have a smell I could revisit when I missed my son. My partner chose to relinquish his obligation to me, so why must I keep mine to him?

I suppose that after all this prose, all of my theorizing and fighting with my favorite theorists, my essay is a failure because I have no answer for how the precarious couple can survive. No answer that will satisfy the author or any reader. Other than that it might be a will, a will to continue on, to claim some semblance of agency in the face of tremendous uncertainty. A will we did not have or did not know how to have. A former therapist told me: if we do not know how to do something, it is because the thing was never modelled for us. We were never taught, and we should not blame ourselves for how someone else failed us. When the exclusionary definitions of humanity push a precarious life to the brink of impossibility, the lesson one learns is this: you are unseen, unloved, nonhuman. Broken and unworthy.

I imagine it must take extraordinary strength of will to take one’s dissatisfaction with this lesson and assert that despite how difficult this may be, I will see you, and you me. I will love you, and you me—because I am a whole, worthy, human person.

You are, too.

About the Author

Sarah Meirose graduated with her MA in English in 2019 from the University of South Dakota, where she also taught as an adjunct professor before the pandemic. Since then, Sarah has worked as a professional baker and chef in the Black Hills. Her poetry and playwriting have appeared in Literature Today and James Madison University’s Gardy Loo! literary arts magazine. She also contributed a pedagogical essay to Texas Tech University’s Vanguard: Exercises for the Creative Writing Classroom (2020). After the events depicted in “The Precarious Couple,” Sarah finds joy in what is now a much quieter life. In addition to creating delicious desserts, Sarah works remotely writing literature study guides and classroom resources for teachers and students of all grade levels. Her latest research project blends narratology and game studies in an analysis of video game adaptations of Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series.

Notes

1. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006. p. 8

2. ibid. 33

3. Boss, Pauline. Ambiguous Loss. Harvard UP, 1999. p. 8-9

4. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, 1981. p. 5

5. ibid. 97

6. ibid. 15

7. ibid. 149

8. ibid. 70

9. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. W. W. Norton, 2002. p. 38

10. Davis, Robert Leigh. “Wound-Dressers and House Calls: Medical Representations in Whitman and Williams.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 6, no. 3, 1989, pp. 133-139. p. 134

11. ibid. 133

12. Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. HarperOne, 1994. p. 3

13. Butler PL 22

14. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 2010. p. 101

15. ibid. 140

16. ibid. 182

17. ibid. 189

18. Boss 107

19. Strobe, Wolfgang and Margaret S. Strobe. Bereavement and Health: The Psychological and Physical Consequences of Partner Loss. Cambridge UP, 1987. p. 7

20. Barthes, Roland. Mourning Diary. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang, 2012. p.139

21. Butler PL 24

22. Barthes LD 173

23. Lewis 22-23

24. Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012, pp. 134-151. pp. 141-142

25. ibid. 142

26. Barthes Diary 68

27. I had previously been assaulted in 2010 by a high school boyfriend, and again on two separate occasions by different strangers at parties my first semester of college in 2012.

28. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003. p. 115