Oblivion
Two days previously: "C'mon. It's not like you're going anywhere for New Year's. Just take the kids this weekend. I'll get 'em another time. Wendy's never done the all-out New Year's date thing before . . ."
It's true Paula wasn't a party person. And she knew all about never doing the New Year's date thing. Peter, over a decade of marriage, had never thought to take her on one.
Peter, after all, was the one who got spoiled.
So, here she was, New Year's Eve, children already tucked into sleeppods in her sizeable penthouse: successful spacecraft designer, three beautiful kids, looking out a gorgeous window at a pantheon of lights and giant holograms, trying to talk herself out of taking the dose of ForgetAl that would give her blissful oblivion for the night.
Peter wouldn't understand wanting oblivion, so proud of how amicable they were post-divorce, how the kids never saw them fight. He'd contrast it with Paula's first husband, Tim's abuse and tyranny, how Tim had tried to break her. Peter was right, of course. Tim had failed to break her only because Paula had never loved him.
From the kitchen vid projector, drunken strains of off-key singing wafted, "Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . ."
Personally, she was thinking forgetting sounded like a good thing.
She hadn't meant to love Peter. He was entirely wrong for her: selfish (unabashedly), chaotic, whimsical, impractical. He was incapable of making something of himself when letting someone else do it was so much easier. God, she'd loved him like mad. Peter was her first selfish thing, the person she loved so illogically such that she gave up her dignity, her personal preferences, anything so that he would stay with her. Losing Peter had been one thing that scared her more than anything else.
And he'd stayed for ten years. He'd told her, with increasing impatience, that her fears that he didn't really love her, that he wouldn't be there forever, were nonsense. Convincingly. She'd wanted to believe.
She switched off the projector with a gesture, and clutched the pill packet. Opened it. Psychotropics would taste nasty. But oblivion was so tempting.
She hadn't believed. She'd spent a decade waiting for the other shoe to drop and, two days before her birthday last year, it dropped. "I love someone else," he'd said, completely without malice. And, with amazing calm—on her part, too—he walked away from his marriage, his children, her, without so much as a backward glance. Perfectly friendly.
His life was much harder now, of course, but he was demonstrably happier. She wasn't angry with him. As she knew, you don't pick whom you love.
She dropped the pills in the incinerator and blinked off the light. She had children to care for and couldn't afford oblivion. She was the responsible one, after all.
She wandered off to bed, alone, as always. She mused that Peter was right. Tim was so much worse than Peter.
But Peter was the one who broke her.