Space part II

The other morning, as we were trying to begin to make sense of our significantly cramped lives here in the one room schoolhouse, my wife asked me what was in the container on the top shelf.

Now, I could see that there were three containers on the top shelf. One was a coconut oil jar, one was a plastic container with split mung dal, and one was a bag of sugar.

My wife is a stickler for precision in speech. Sometimes it’s like being married to an English teacher. I get corrected on verb tenses, personal pronouns, what to speak of grammar and usage.

Plus, she’s very specific about communication in general. She doesn’t have any patience for my “creating language and reality along with it as we go along” tendencies. Not in the slightest.

In addition, she often misplaces her glasses, and honestly can’t see.

So when she asked me what was in the container, I looked up there and saw one, two, three containers. I didn’t know which one she was referring to. Could it have been the only unmarked one? Or was this a test from Krishna to see if I could guess correctly and pick out the one she was referring to?

To make things even more dicey, I could already sense a wave of irritability coming over us both. It was one of those pre-breakfast, pre-carbohydrate tranquilizer moments when the static of nerve-induced friction is at its highest. We’ve often come closest to divorce in such moments, over gaps in communication that later (after a big feed) seem trivial and stupid.

“There are three containers. One is coconut oil, one is mung beans, and one is sugar.” There. I did it. Wrong answer.

A look like I had poured tar into her shampoo bottle crossed her face. “That’s just great. Very clever. Very clever,” she said.
(Subtitle: “There is no love between us. You hate me. You live only to give me pain. You evidently want me dead, and I wish the same for you.”)

I could see she was upset, but I wasn’t going to let it immobilize me or get boilingly, uncomprehendingly irate, reactive, and defensive like I usually do.

Over breakfast, I apologized. “I’m sorry if it seemed like I was trying to be a wise guy before. I honestly just wasn’t sure which container you meant (I explained the inner psychology of my choice of answering her question) , and that’s why I gave the whole inventory, that’s all. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for being so cranky. Thanks for saying something,” she said.

I went on. “I just figured this place is too small for any dissention. We don’t have any doors to slam in each other’s faces, no walls to hide behind. We better not let anything come between us.”

Life’s so short, anyway. I mean, when we get to the end of our short-and-feeling-shorter-all-the-time lifespan, just before stepping into our next existence, are we really going to be thinking, “God damn it! I was right! I was right all along!”?