That Didn't Happen

“I don’t care what laundry detergent you get. Get whatever you want, Babe.” Clara’s shoulders should have softened after her husband gave her permission to get the laundry detergent, but the tendons in her neck wound tight like a fishing wire on a reel. She stared at the wall of nearly identical detergents claiming to be better than the other. Cleans more loads than the leading brands!

“Okay, I just wanted to make sure you were good with that,” Clara’s voice was small.

Her husband, starting to sound a bit annoyed and confused now asked, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Clara didn’t know how to answer his question without sounding accusatory, but he had expressed discontent with similar small decisions before. “Remember, you told me pretty firmly only one brand makes your clothes feel clean.”

“I don’t remember that.”

Didn’t remember? Clara couldn’t wrap her head around how he didn’t remember since he had had such a strong opinion years ago. As she stood in the store on the phone, she remembered how he shouted at her after she brought home a more economical detergent. The two had been dating for a year at that point. There was no yelling and no fights. It was relationship bliss. And although they lived separately, they didn’t really. Clara was never over at her place; instead she was always at Ethan’s apartment eating his food and using his laundry machine. Clara’s friend joked about how he wasn’t her boyfriend but her husband with the way they were never apart. Like any good partnership, Clara wanted to do right by Ethan and at least replace the stuff that she used. It was only fair. That didn’t satisfy him, nothing did. Even laundry detergent was a problem and could start World War 3. Clara shrunk as he told her he wouldn’t use the detergent she bought. “It’s fine I’ll buy my own detergent but I’m not using that one! I want my clothes to feel clean.”

“Ok.” That word was so small as it came out of her mouth. Clara remembered him walking back into his office where weeks-old crumbs lay on the floor and where dust was piled as high as the messy stacks of papers on his desk. Clara let him go and went out to the kitchen to grab a drink and sit down. She was about to turn on the sink when a silverback crawled out of the sink. A belch vibrated through the closed office door.

A familiar belch vibrated through the phone. Brought back to the detergent aisle, Clara spoke up, “I know you had a strong opinion before, so I wanted to make sure you’d be fine, but I think I am having an allergic reaction to our normal detergent. I just wanted to try something else.”

“Okay.” He said encouragingly like he had never been opposed to trying new laundry detergent before.

“Alright, I’m just trying to respect you.”

“I hear you. Appreciate it.”

“Okay, I’ll be home soon.”

“Love you, bye”

“Bye”. Clara looked for a dye-free, fragrance-free detergent in her husband’s favorite brand. A small compromise, but there was only one option for a clean and clear laundry detergent and it was not the right brand.

I looked over at my friend who had come with me and gave her a weak smile. “He said it’s okay. I hope he likes it,” I shrugged as I grabbed the only organic detergent from the shelf.

This wasn’t the only moment where Clara’s memory seemed inconsistent.

Clara woke to the soft hum of morning sunlight spilling across the bedroom floor. She stretched and glanced around but something felt…off. She tried blinking the morning blurriness out of her sight. It didn’t help. She could see the room clearly, yet something felt different. Maybe it was the lighting. The morning sun gave the room a more yellow hue than usual. The streams of light were steadily rising from the floor and would disappear soon, leaving the room to its normal color. Clara rose from bed and walked to the bedroom door. As she was about to go downstairs, she saw a beam of light hit the corner of a picture on her bedroom wall. The picture was slightly askew. Ethan must have accidently grazed it.

Downstairs, the kitchen smelled strongly of coffee. Clara poured herself a cup. Once again it tasted burnt. She had asked Ethan to measure the coffee. I’ll just add some milk and sugar. She noticed the sugar container. It was empty! “I could have sworn I filled this last night,” she mumbled under her breath. She ran her fingers through her hair and expelled a long exhale. Ethan emerged from his office, smiling and casually holding his empty coffee mug.

“You didn’t fill the sugar?” he asked, tilting his head. “I thought you did.”

“I… I thought I did too.”

“You must be tired. You’ve been stressed lately,” Ethan said lightly, pulling her into a hug. “Don’t stress so much. What do you really have to stress about?”

Clara nodded, but the feeling of unease lingered. Over the next few months, the small inconsistencies continued. Objects were moved. Doors were left unlocked. Conversations she remembered having were denied. Each time, Ethan’s calm, charming smile would appear, and he would correct here. “You’re stressed” … “That’s not what I said” … “Are you listening to me?” … “That didn’t happen”.

At first she questioned herself. Was she getting enough sleep? Maybe it was stress. Ethan and Clara were going through a rough patch. But she had been stressed before and nothing like this had happened. Clara’s uneased deepened as she started noticing patterns within the inconsistencies. The sugar container seemed to need refilled more frequently. Her keys, which she always left on the hallway table, were in odd spots. It was making her head spin.

The coffee had gone down smoothly with a bit of sugar, but she couldn’t stay in pajama’s all day. She was meeting her friend for lunch. Clara looked into the mirror. She was the same person she’d always been, but something looked different. Maybe her eyes were more sunken. Maybe she looked tired. Maybe she was just getting older.

Ethan poked his head around the corner of the bathroom door, “Hey, what’s your inspirational quote today?” Sticky notes of varying colors spread like a half rainbow up Clara’s side of the mirror. Highlighter orange, pink, and green squares were placed haphazardly in a way that framed Clara’s face. The notes started as a sweet gesture from Ethan when they were dating. Clara was fresh out of college and Ethan was at the beginning of his career. Clara’s career wasn’t starting well in comparison to Ethan’s. Not that her career was what she wanted to do with her life anyway. She wanted to throw herself into art, but her art wasn’t coming easy to her either. It squeezed Ethan’s heart to see a grey cloud over Clara. So, he decided uplifting notes would bring her rainbows and sunshine.

“You would know if you hadn’t stopped,” Clara accused.

Ethan eyebrows furrowed. “I always put notes on your mirror”

Clara couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He was correcting her on who puts these sticky notes up daily. She would remember who put these up especially considering she was the one that did it every day. “You stopped. I continued.”

“That’s just not true, Clara.”

Clara’s eyebrows angled into a look of angered disgusted. This was another small thing he was arguing about. Even if Ethan put one out of 100 sticky notes on the mirror, she was still the one doing the daily work.

“Look at the handwriting, Babe.” Ethan pointed to the first one. Then pointed to the next one and the next one, each of them in his handwriting. “Whose handwriting is this?”

“Yours,” Clara said with a huff. The patience was leaving Ethan’s eyes. “Maybe you did do more of them this week than I realized.”

Clara looked at the assorted uplifting notes; she could have sworn she had written more of them than that.

“I think you need to take another look at today’s,” Ethan encouraged, trying to calm both of their nerves.

Pray big!

“It happened again today,” Clara said, her voice rising in borderline panic. “Ethan, changed the narrative again!” Her frustration was rising. Her friend patiently let her rant as they sat outside of the cafe, but the creases in her friend’s forehead deepened further into a frown each time they got together for lunch. Laura heard Clara’s voice rise in pitch. Each conversation about Ethan became more cracked as Clara told her stories at a million miles an hour, often linking one bad experience to another. The more links in the chain of inconsistent behavior, the more broken Clara became. Ethan wasn’t sounding like the man they thought he was. These interactions were a far cry from the bragging that Clara used to do. Clara and Ethan used to light up each other’s world, but only a dark cloud and thunderclap criticisms followed Clara now.

It was a shame that Clara was in the shadows when the day was so bright. Laura listened, her hands wrapped around her mug and crumbs of her sandwich left on her plate, while Clara waved her hands frantically in the air pleading for someone to notice her distress, her sandwich untouched. “You remember the laundry detergent. You saw how he changed his mind.”

“I do remember,” Laura said.

“How am I supposed to know what makes him happy when he changes his mind all the time?”

“I don’t know”. The words fell dully between them. There were only a handful of options she could tell Clara to do and none of them were going to be pretty.

“It’s like he does it so that I’m always wrong. He always has to find some way to be right.” It was a hard truth that was harder than the crusty bread getting stale in the open air.

The two friends sat for a while, finally in silence as Clara took a breath and a bit of sandwich. Clara gazed into the distance thinking about all that her husband had down to her. Before, these little things could be dismissed as imperfections – no relationship is perfect – but as they became more frequent, Clara knew she couldn’t keep living this way. It was making her crazy. And that was something Ethan said often too. You’re crazy… What are you talking about, Babe … I never did that. Her husband’s words swam in her head, making her brain spin again.

“I’m at the point where I want to record our conversations so I can play them back to him, but the fact that I need to do that tells me what I already need to know about our relationship.”

Laura didn’t argue. She never argued with Clara. She was there to repeat back what Clara told her about life with Ethan. “I won’t discourage you from doing that. It could give you peace of mind or if finding out the truth will hurt more, don’t do it.”

“It already hurts.”

“I’m sorry, my friend.”

The endless hours of arguing, the belittling, the constant corrections, the nights of crying to mourn the loss of love cascaded through Clara’s nervous system. Her body trembled. This needed to end.

Clara and Laura stopped at the store on the way home from lunch. Clara picked up a planner from the office supply aisle. It was tan, nothing too fancy, but it had a quote written in gold The Future is Golden. She was ready. She planned to write down her actions along with Ethan’s and the reality that followed suit. No more would Ethan torment her with his lies. But what did she plan to do afterwards? She wasn’t sure. The future was as blank… or as fresh… as these pages. Maybe with this she could start living again.

Over the next few weeks, Clara wrote major events that stuck out to her. They were also things that Ethan would have never noticed like conversations that Ethan would have never remembered. He never seemed to remember when he made a contradiction or when he corrected her. Now he’d be forced to reconcile the almost daily arguments that he often undermined as debates the few times Clara would bring them up. He couldn’t tell her it wasn’t a big deal or that it wasn’t that often anymore either. The pages of her agenda were already full.

“I’m not crazy,” Clara whispered as she flipped through her notes.

“What was that, Babe?” Ethan yelled from the other room.

“Nothing,” Clara said back as she slipped the planner back into her dresser drawer. She walked out into the living room and sat next to her husband on the couch.

“I thought I heard you say something.” Ethan reiterated as he flipped through shows trying to find something that caught his attention.

“I was just speaking through some plans before I wrote them in my agenda.” Clara said as she smiled at Ethan. He didn’t notice. He continued to scroll without taking a pause.

“Is there anything you want to watch?” Ethan clearly couldn’t find anything that interested him, not that he would like anything she picked either.

“No. I probably won’t stay up too much longer anyways.”

“Have you seen my agenda?” Clara asked, panic rising. “I left it in my drawer last night like I always do.”

Ethan looked up. “Agenda? You mean the one you always leave lying around? I didn’t touch it, Clara.”

Her heart thumped. She wasn’t buying his lies. “I could have sworn I put it back last night.”

“You’re stressed. You haven’t been feeling well either,” he said softly. “You should rest. I’ll take care of the house and dinner tonight.”

She resigned herself to her husband’s suggestion as he guided her to the bedroom. It was only half way through the day. The sun was still out and shining through the window blinds. A stream of light hit directly at where her eyeballs would be once she laid down on the pillow.

She closed her eyes and her husband put calming music on. “Do you need anything?”

Clara thought for a moment. She could think of a thousand things she wanted her husband to do for her. She knew she wasn’t getting any of them though. “No, I don’t need anything.”

Ethan left the room. Too bad for Clara it wasn’t out of sight, out of mind. She had lost her proof and her mind spun like a perpetual hamster on a wheel. Her thoughts were going nowhere but in circles, driving her insane. She kept recounting every event, every conversation, and every day she had written down over the last few weeks. Each moment stung as a new tear rolled down her face.

“I can’t do this anymore”. Clara’s agony twisted her stomach. She wept quietly to herself and clutched the blanket and pillow in her hands as she smothered her face in the comfort of both.

Pulling out her phone, she texted Laura the news. “My planner is missing.”

“Missing? Did you misplace it?”

“NO”

“K. Could Ethan have taken it?”

“IDK.”

“It’s okay. We’ll figure this out.”

As they were texting, Clara scrolled Facebook. She was looking for something to distract her from her own torturous thoughts. “Have you seen these Am I an Asshole threads?”

“I love those! They are so entertaining.”

“So many of them are similar to what I’m going through with Ethan.”

“Wait. What if we put your story on Reddit? We could get unbiased feedback about you and Ethan.”

Clara thought about it. She would have to prepare herself for some brutal comments. There wouldn’t be any sugarcoating from this community. Of course, maybe Laura knew that’s what she needed.

“Let’s do it.”

The internet commentators delivered in all of their spectacular glory. Pages upon pages of comments demonizing Ethan and his behavior.

“You’re crazy.” Ethan’s mouth dropped unable to believe what Clara was showing him.

“Clearly I’m not. I kept telling Laura that I felt like I was losing my mind. She always had my back, and now I have more proof.”

“No, you are crazy, Clara. None of this happened,” he said gesturing towards the stories she told about him online.

“It did. And I wrote it all down in that agenda you hid.”

“Fine! We’ll prove it. Go to the doctor.” Ethan waved his hand toward the door.

Before they knew it, they were both sitting in a bright, white hospital room waiting for the doctor to come in with Clara’s scans.

A quiet knock and a click of the door handle made the couple look up. Ethan had been slouched over as they waited for the news while Clara sat tall. The doctor walked in, clipboard in hand. He tried to hide under a poker face, but he did not do it well. “Are you two ready for the news?”

Later that night, Ethan found Clara in bed. He had a cup of tea in hand. She was not in the mood to speak to him.

“I swore you did all those things. I can clearly see them,” Clara said, angry that Ethan would deny her memory yet again.

Ethan sighed, “Remember, the brain tumor messes with your memory, Clara. Don't be angry at me, please."