It's No Mistake

I'll admit it: it's been ages since I've posted anything. I went back to school, earned a degree and started a new career since my last story, and so I'm just putting a short one act piece out there to dip my toes in the water, as it were.

mistake: an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong.

"I won't let you throw our marriage away because of one stupid mistake!" Alicia, my soon-to-be-served wife, shouted, every word wavering as if she was moments away from emotional collapse. For a little under three hours she had been randomly shifting between anger, sorrow, remorse and obstinate delusion. Things had gotten old after the first twenty or so minutes, and I had left her in the living room to find her own way through the situation she had placed us in.

Truth be told, she was looking rather haggard: her eyes were puffy and red from over two hours of nearly non-stop crying while the rest of her face was mottled with red blotches from where she had either buried her head in her arms or pressed her hands to her face while she railed against the inevitable. Until that last sentence, I had curiously been rather detached; the righteous indignation with which I had announced my intent to divorce her had waned, leaving me somewhere between entertained and ambivalent where her tantrum was concerned.

It wasn't even the sentence itself which returned me to a fit of pique, it was only one word: mistake.

"Oh, I have no doubt you made a mistake," I spat, amazed at how quickly my mood returned to its previous state, "but I'm certain it's not what you think it is."

That got her attention, as she raised her head to at last look me in the eye. The question was clear as day on her face: she had no clue what I was talking about...but I was finding myself on a roll, and would take care of that for her straight away.

"You did make a mistake, Alicia," I reiterated, "in that you decided that I either would not discover that you had a lover, would love you too much to ever leave you or that you could somehow convince to overlook it all."

Realistically, I discounted the first possibility, as the two of them had been fairly brazen in their actions. In fact, it had been my own sister who had clued me in that something was not right in my marriage after she had seen Alicia and her toy boy coming out of the Marriott hotel downtown. If I were a betting man, I would place money on the last of my listed options, that Alicia had somehow convinced herself that she could talk her way out of things, if ever her affair came to light.

"Everything else after your mistaken decision was not another mistake; every last action was merely based upon that original mistake. Every time you met with your toy boy, every time you two fucked, every moment of plotting and planning that it took to make it all happen? Those were not mistakes," I was starting to hit my stride in this particular tirade. "If I'm feeling generous, the best I can do is call them consequences of your mistake...but we both know that consequences they are not."

The crying had stopped, and I realized that I had her undivided attention.

"Because you mistakenly decided that this tawdry little affair would be alright," I continued, not daring to allow her even a moment to interject and potentially divert me from my course, "you've put me in the position of having to realize that my wife respects neither me nor the vows we made when we married."

Her eyes were now wide; was it possible she was actually hearing what I said?

"So why aren't your actions consequences?" I posed. "Simply put, each time you made your plans, you had to revisit your decision-making process to justify your actions. Time and again, you decided that I either wouldn't know, wouldn't leave or would be able to be handled after the fact. That's the same mistake, repeated how many times? Every email, every text, every phone call...and, of course, every time you fucked him."

She was now rigid, staring at me. I wasn't entirely certain she was breathing, but at this point I honestly didn't care one way or the other.

"If it's any consolation," I said, as I realized that I was entering the home stretch of my monolog, "I, too, made a mistake. I mistakenly thought that you were smart enough to grasp the meaning of the pledge we made to each other on the day of our wedding; I also thought you weren't foolish enough to believe that there were exceptions to those promises."

Alicia must have been breathing, as she wasn't turning blue or purple, though the shade of ashen gray that was her current pallor truly wasn't doing her any favors.

"The beautiful thing about mistakes, Alicia," I concluded, "is that we are able to learn from them and hopefully in such a way that we won't repeat them in the future. I know I have, and now I bid you adieu."

With that, I picked up my suitcases, closed the front door and made my way into my continuing life.