The Luckiest Girl In The World.

He kisses me, on my lips,  before he excuses himself and goes to get me the glass of wine for which I just expressed desire. I am standing in a group of older women. I don't know them very well and they don't know me at all, but it's the kind of festive environment in which it doesn't matter whether people know one another, you're friends because you were invited to the same event. They stare, approvingly, at my husband as he hurries back towards us. A moment ago, he was being a cheerleader for me, as he often is, and telling them things about my career I would never tell anyone myself. He hands me the glass of wine and tells me I look so pretty.

"What a nice guy you have married," the woman beside me whispers into my shoulder, "You are such a lucky girl."

I smile at her, because it would be odd to smile at myself. I drink my wine, chugging it like cheap beer, as if it quenches a thirst that has surpassed water.

"I really am," I tell her, "The luckiest girl in the world."

I excuse myself and walk over to the restroom. I bolt the cubicle and clutch my legs to my chest. It's hard to stand and smile when I am in so much pain, I rub between my legs, not to extract any kind of pleasure, but to soothe the inflamed skin. I try to wrap my arms around my abdomen and squeeze, but no amount of pressure soothes the pain on the inside. I cry from my throat, it's not like normal crying with tears and relief; tears would ruin the careful make-up around my eyes and reveal the bruises I have covered with brush strokes of darkness and relief is a childish dream at this point. My crying sounds like quiet dry-heaving and it serves the purpose of an anti-inflammatory pill for a broken arm. I guess it's true, women never get the painkillers we truly need. Truly, I'd like to wail in the stylings of a *rudaali*. Rudaali refers to a professional female weeper, they're summoned, still, in some parts of Rajasthan to mourn loudly on behalf of a grieving family, to make a spectacle of the pain in a way that is unpalatable to polite society. I'd like to cry like that, like I am not just crying for myself, but for the universe and all the pain within it. I'd like to cry with my eyes, my chest and every muscle in my being. I'd like to throw myself to the floor in response to the pain.

Instead, I stand up, exit the cubicle, glance at myself in the mirror and walk out of the restroom. He is waiting for me outside the door.

"What were you doing in there?" He asks, standing in front of me and removing me completely from view.

"Just..." I begin to say, before realising I don't know how to explain it, "I'm in so much pain, I needed a moment."

He puts his hand on my arm, to an onlooker it would seem like an act of tenderness, but he can see the bruise beneath my coat because he put it there, and he knows that I understand the intention of touching me there. He holds my arm but I know it's not a man embracing his lover, it's a knife at my throat reminding me that I am not his lover. No matter what the world sees, if I forget that, he would slice my throat in a heartbeat.  

"You don't get a moment," he says, smiling as if he is about to launch into a ballad, "You will go back out there, smile and laugh, be your delightfully charming self, even dance if someone asks you to, or I will take you home right now, whip your cunt and fuck you with a hammer till you learn to behave."

A darkness falls over my face and a jolt of pain shoots from my clitoris to my deep inside me somewhere, I don't know what he did to my body to make arousal painful, but it's done. I squeeze as my eyes shut as if he is actively hurting me, this day feels like a haze, like I stepped out of a prison where to which I committed myself for the drunkenness of torture and isolation, straight into a vortex of festivity where I am forced to enjoy the sobriety of formulaic joy and inebriation.

"Smile, you fucking cunt," he says, so sweetly, as he watches my face drop and my knees buckle.

I force a smile onto my face, like the swish-swish of the make-up brushes that made my pain invisible, I paint a smile onto my face to make myself invisible.

"That's better," he says, squeezing my arm just a little bit to test my resolve, "I better find a smile on your face every single time I look at you this evening, if I see the slightest indication of your pain on your face, you're going to regret it."

What kind of sick game is this?

He is as good as his word, though, all evening, I can feel his eyes follow me around the lawn. I can feel his gaze on me even when I cannot find him in the grounds. I can feel his ears present at every polite conversation I have with people I mostly likely will never see again. I can feel his fingers pulling my lips upwards, the tension with which I smile makes my face hurt. I must look like a fool.  On the inside, I keep screaming. I keep thinking back to the afternoon when he tied my legs apart and whipped my cunt with his belt until I started to cry and beg him to stop. I wish I could tell the girl I was a decade ago that I don't have to fuck criminals and assholes to keep them going past the moment when I couldn't take it anymore, I wish I could tell her that it's entirely possible to be put into true hell by a man who will dot every I and cross every t before he ever touches you and have that placebo of hell be just as genuine as what she believed to be real. It's too late for her, hell, it's too late for me. I have fastened my heart too firmly to cruelty and nothing else will ever feel like romance the way this does.

I steal a moment to walk to the bar and get myself another glass of wine, and I find him there, conversing with a group of men he would happily have me parade before naked if it served the goals of our debauchery.

"It's my beautiful wife!" he announces, with pomp and excitement, "Can I get you something, my love?"

This act he is putting on for the benefit of these strangers is bestowing upon me the amusement I need to get through this evening. For a moment, my smile is real. *His beautiful wife*. Like he gives an everloving fuck about my alleged beauty. I don't give a fuck either. He doesn't want me to be beautiful. I don't want to give him my beauty either. All he wants from me is my ugliness. He spent all day making me feel ugly. He spent all month making me feel ugly. Each day convincing me I am more vile and disgusting than I know; making me apologize for subjecting his eyes to my body, for making him directly when he fucks me. All I feel now when he touches me between my legs is the shame of knowing that I am too dirty and pathetic to be touched by another person, apologies just pour out of my mouth when he touches me, because I *know* in my bones that I have sullied him with my need.

As he sat between my legs earlier today, having assaulted my face into a foul concoction of snot, spit and asymmetry, he kept telling me how ugly my cunt is to him. He pulled at the hair he made grow between my legs so he could justifiably call me an animal. He infects me with his fetishes and now I am doomed to go through the rest of my life knowing that I will always be turned on by having my pubic hair pulled as I am shamed for even allowing them to grow. I could have made it through life just fine having never discovered this strange and intoxicating mess. After I moaned my helplessness into his hand as he pulled the hair between my legs, he rose in exasperation and put a pillowcase over my head. He told me the ugly sounds coming from my ugly face were distracting from the proper debasement of my ugly cunt. He has called me ugly so many times in the past month, I now feel like the word just means *me* and here he stands, announcing my beauty to the world, not for them to see, but because it provides him some venial thrill to exist in this dichotomy.

He gives me another glass of wine and puts his arm around me. We walk through the lawns together, bidding adieu to dozens of people I do not know. I draw out the goodbyes because the fear of going back home with him is real, I love him and our home, but maybe I love the fear more than those things. I draw out meaningless conversations and this much too literal condition of forced-smiling, because the fear is a drink much more potent than this empty wine in my hands. Inebriation is a fleeting state of madness, fear enables a haunting state of madness much more permanent. He haunts me and my crumbling structure, more reminiscent of times past than present, covered in faded paint that betrays just enough of the ruins inside to make a solivagant traveller curious enough to venture, was built to be haunted.

As we walk to the parking lot together, he lets go of my hand. He walks faster than I am able to and demands that I keep up with him. I open the car door for him before I get in on my side.

"You can stop smiling now," he says as I get into the car and put on the seatbelt, "Even the suggestion of your joy is sickening."

He laughs, more in amusement than anything else, but perhaps, as well, at the strange conundrum he has created inside my head. I laugh as well, less in amusement than in the helplessness that has confused my emotional expression mechanisms into believing laughter could express pain.

"You're a monster," I tell him.

"I know," he says, "And you, you're the luckiest girl in the world."