Choked

She told me that I’d choked the life out of her. She was adventurous before she met me; she ‘had dreams’.  According to her; twelve years with me had quelled every aspiration she’d had. Just over a decade as my wife is enough, she said, to steal from her even her ability to hope for the future. Now, all she looks forward to is the tiny fragment of a moment at night, when my monotonous wheezing breaths stop. Now, her only dream, only hope is that the brief halt in my respiration is actually a sign of the halting of my entire existence not just a harmless symptom of sleep apnea. Her only aspiration now is that one day when she rolls over in the morning - after she remembers that this dreary life is hers and the depression sets in again -my eyes will be staring back at her with no life behind them. As she spewed all these venomous nothings at me I noticed that the flecks of spittle flying from her mouth were reaching a further distance with every angry word directed at me.  I made a mental note to avoid them when they eventually approached. She always spat when she raised her voice. I watched the dampness on her bottom lip collecting as I let her words wash over me. Those lips. The red gloss I once was so enticed by now sunk into their dry cracks and collected in little repulsive blobs across them. Those lips. Once so plump and encouraging, were now wrinkled, fine, and in permanent scorn. I moved my gaze across her face. Contorted in rage and wizened so severely somehow by so few years she did not look like the woman who lay beneath me so happily once. Those lips. How I ever coveted them perplexed me. Flashes of memories raced through my mind, my hand running up a sweaty thigh, red lips quavering and gasping, breath against my neck, a small chuckle of achievement and a lit cigarette. It all made sense then, because she was it. All I wanted, all my dreams, my hopes, my aspirations. I allowed my eyes to travel across her body, wondering how I ever explored it without nausea. My vision wandered up from her calf, mentally undressing her as I went and lingering on her decrepit breast. Disgusted I looked around me at our drab house, our tedious life, our meaningless existence. The apartment we lived in, a cesspit of vermin and regret.  I wasn’t even feigning interest in whatever she was hissing at me anymore. I allowed myself one more sweep over her body and back to her face and then my eyes caught hers. And there it was; everything I’d lost swimming in her blue irises. Trapped there since the day we stood in front of the lord and lied. I felt a speckle of saliva land on my cheek and that was it. I saw red. Those lips. Those monstrous lips, gasping and quavering once more.
She told me that I’d choked the life out of her. So I did.