When the Body Knows Before the Mind Does (01 EN)

I keep going back there in my head.

Reluctantly, but I go. It is our wedding anniversary, and the wound starts throbbing all over again. I clench my jaw and go back to the breaking point: his birthday, a year and a half ago.

He wants to change his wardrobe, and we head to the shopping mall.

For the first time in a long while, I put on heels and suffer like a martyr. These shoes hurt, no question about it. He does not look comfortable in his own skin either. When he looks at me, it feels like the gaze of an inquisitor. It is quiet and menacing.

No familiar humour like before, just a limping conversation.

Do you know that feeling when something speaks up in the body first, and only later in the mind?

I can feel it somewhere around my stomach. But my mind still has no idea what that strange trembling pressure inside me means.

I do not know this warning light yet.

It is like when a symbol lights up on your dashboard and you have no idea whether it means an occupied bathroom or the immediate evacuation of the planet. It is glowing red. Something is wrong. You just do not know what. But the car is still moving, so you keep moving too.

My husband had always been a handsome man, at least to me. Tall, well built, somehow compelling. When I first met him, he had that defiance in his eyes, that restlessness and faint contempt that irritated me and attracted me at the same time. He was different. And he was three years younger. I fell in love.

But he had never been much of a dresser. He wore short-sleeved checked shirts to the office, jeans, and Nike sneakers left over from his basketball years. We started out in Prague when he was nineteen. And then for a quarter of a century we played on the same side of the relationship court. The last twelve years in England.

And now he is walking into HUGO BOSS.

He walks in with confidence, despite the fact that neither of us obviously belongs there. But that is about to change. At least for him.

I take in the atmosphere of the store, where smiling is part of the uniform. I watch his back. He moves through the place with a kind of contemptuous ease that gets under my skin, because I am wound tight with tension. I am already tired, and I have the feeling he is deliberately dragging out the torture of my blistered feet. With every step, tears press closer to my eyes.

And him?

He does not care.

He lets himself be waited on in the fitting room as if shopping here were simply part of his daily routine.

Wait. Does he actually want to shop here?

I feel as though I am in Pretty Woman, except this version is no longer funny. He is Julia Roberts and Richard Gere at the same time.

Me?

The glorified bag holder.

I am carrying his jacket, a bag from another store, and his baseball cap balanced on my head. He parades one outfit after another in front of me, but this time he is not waiting for my opinion the way he normally does. That unsettles me, and hurts more than I want to admit.

And on top of that, he looks annoyingly good.

Brilliant.

He does not look like my man. Not even like some ordinary London software developer. He looks somehow... different.

Like a BOSS.

And he acts like one too.

That year had already started strangely. A strange business trip to America. A blood clot after the flight. One change after another. Conflict after conflict. Something had already been moving underneath the surface, and my body knew it before I did. That is why I am in no mood for shopping. That is why I do not want to be here. That is why I am tired, irritated, and uneasy.

And still I tell myself: do not overreact.

Women often do not read danger as danger. We read it as a task to fix. That is how I reacted too. These damned new shoes were part of it.

And meanwhile he is posing in a well-cut blazer and taking photos of himself in the mirror. I had never seen him take photos of himself before. Not even selfies. Or so I thought. As I watch him now, I realise I have seen him do it before. I just hadn’t registered it.

“For a colleague.”

I sit there and look at him. It is obvious this is not just trying things on.

He is buying all of it.

That expression passes over his face like a shadow. Not fully certain yet, not fully self-assured.

But determined already.

This is where a new HIM is being born.
New armour for the next level of the game.

And through my mind flashes the fact that an hour earlier I had been hesitating over a Guess handbag on sale for eighty pounds.

The real blow comes at the till. His card slides through the reader like a sword through somebody else’s purse. Glitter paid for on credit.

But I quickly flip my irritation into a familiar position. If he earns the money for it, then fine, let him have it. I am generous. That unpleasant feeling is surely my problem.

As women, we start balancing the weight of a relationship long before we realise it has become a weight at all.

We leave.

Him as the newest member of the Hugo Boss club.
Me as the limping wife whose shredded feet can barely carry her back to the car.

At that moment, only my heel was bleeding.

A few hours later, my heart started bleeding too.

We drive home in such silence that I can almost touch my own alertness.