January 9, 2022 by Amy
Killing Me Softly With His Door
“If he can’t learn how to close the motherfracking door softly, I’m going to murder him while he sleeps.”
This is a thought that rolled through my head every single morning when we were off over Zoe’s winter break. We don’t set alarms when we’re on vacation, and I relished sleeping in every morning. I usually wake up around my normal time but then I remember that I do not have to get up and I snuggle down deeper into the sheets and fall back asleep. It’s heaven. M has an internal clock that goes off early no matter what, which is assisted by his wife gracefully snoring like a freight train and the sunlight pouring in our east-facing bedroom windows, so he naturally rises earlier than I do. When we’re alarmed during work days, we get up at roughly the same time.
Morning after morning over break, he would quietly exit the bed and move silently around, gather his clothes or his running gear, and then pad across the floor, softly open the door, and slowly pull it closed. Except that he wasn’t turning the handle to suck the latch back in all the way to avoid hitting the strike plate on the door jamb. In the stillness of the early morning, it sounded like a shot. Metal on metal. It was jarring. And it woke me up, day after blasted day. He was out the door too quickly for me to say anything—the shot happens just as he’s closing the door—and I was too lazy to get out of my warm bed, chase him down, and reprimand him (I mean, I was on vacation), so I drifted back to sleep, content with knowing I could rip him a new one once I eventually got up.
Only by the time I got up and got moving, I’d forget that he had been so utterly inconsiderate. Then the next morning it’d happen again and I would swear to myself that we were going to have A Lesson In Closing the Damn Door that day. How hard is it to close the door softly? Why work so hard to be quiet when you’re just gonna tank it all by not turning the handle all the way? What kind of monster does that?
This is different than the times he does something to upset me in a dream, when I wake up angry at him and then find him and yell at him for so rudely leaving me behind at some event or other. This is always the dream, although the location and the characters change. We go somewhere together, and then he disappears and I’m left standing there, wondering where he is, whether he’s coming back, and if he took the car. Must be a fear of abandonment or something. He always leaves me with other people so I’m not truly alone, and his coworkers or our friends or the other attendees at the volleyball coaches’ conference (yes, he abandoned me once at a conference I had no business being at) or whoever are perfectly willing to give me a ride home, but I’m so pissed at him that it carries over into the morning and I glower at him over a toasted bagel while he shrugs and says, “What? I’m right here.”
So we get through nearly two weeks of him closing the door with a bang and me wanting to take him out with a bazooka for several seconds each morning and then it comes to January 3, time for me to return to work. His office was closed, so he had one more day off than me. My alarm went off and I quickly silenced it before slipping from the bed. I quietly changed into my yoga clothes and tiptoed over to the door, gripping my phone and being careful to not touch the screen and trigger the bright light. See? Some of us are considerate of others. I gently turned the handle on our door, crept out, and pulled the door toward me to close it. I was very careful to turn the handle all the way back to avoid that latch connecting with the strike plate. Some of us are civilized. The door was nearly closed when CRACK. Shot fired. It came from the other side of the door. It’s one of the damn hinges, not the latch and strike plate. I had been pissed at him consistently every morning for two weeks about something over which he had no control.
Which, come to think of it, is pretty typical in a happy marriage.
I’m super glad I was too lazy to get up all those mornings over vacation, and didn’t flatten him out for his rude behavior when I was trying to sleep. Now he’ll never know that I was wrong and he was perfectly innocent. Well, he’s innocent until he leaves me behind in a dream again. Jerk.
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