Fear of roaches runs in my family, like brown eyes and autoimmune disease. My husband learned early on in our marriage that a blood curdling scream from across the house did not, in fact, mean I was being murdered by a machete-wielding bad guy. I shriek for tiny wood roaches, for giant, bloated bugs, and for anything in between. I’ve always hated the way roaches scurry across the floor and their dying crunch under my husband’s shoe. When I see one—and in Texas, you never see just one—adrenaline shoots through my body.

Living with someone you love means having the privilege of picking and choosing the chores you want to do. My husband barely set foot in a grocery store while we were married. A year after our wedding, I was no longer convinced I’d recognize a broom if I saw one. And there’s no way I was killing the roaches if there was another person around to take care of that for me.

Marriage promises protection. Marriage is having someone to cover your eyes during the scary part of the movie. Someone to tell you that you are loved, that you are precious, even if just to them. Someone to guard against the great void of loneliness out there in the big, scary world. Someone to hold your hand and snuggle with you in the dark. Someone to kill the roaches.

When my husband and I first started dating, I wasn’t yet able to admit my fear of roaches. I’m self-reliant, a feminist, strong. Acknowledging such a silly phobia made me feel weak and embarrassed. Needing my husband to rescue me was a truth I wanted to sweep into the trash along with the bug itself.

But somehow, when you love and trust someone deeply, showing vulnerability brings you closer together. Being a grown woman who’s afraid of roaches isn’t pitiful; it was a part of me that my husband loved, along with my smile and my ability to find hope in even the darkest times.

In my rational mind, I know a roach can frighten me or disgust me, but the tiny bug on the floor or wall in front of me can never actually harm me. Towards the end of my marriage, I realized that there are things in my life far more dangerous than an insect-things that have the power to break both my bones and my spirit.

In my second year of marriage, life-threatening brain inflammation confined me to bed for the better part of a year. Pumped full of steroids and immunosuppressants, I eventually recovered. My atrophied legs carried me to the couch, then the kitchen, and finally to my car in the garage. But something in my husband snapped. Before my illness he had nodded when I suggested Mexican food for dinner. Now he flew into a rage and screamed at me for telling him what to do.

I recovered from my illness. My husband never did.

In the first year of my recovery, the garage door hummed open every weekday evening. I sat silently and listened for his footsteps from wherever I was in the house. Light footsteps meant I could relax. But if I heard his feet pounding into the floorboards, I disappeared to the back of the house—past the pantry door he had ripped off its hinges, past the twisted wire of what was once a shelf. I shut the door of my office behind me as quietly as I could.

As time went on, I barely recognized the man I married. He roared and hurled insults where we used to sit and talk calmly. I sat still and silent on the couch, my legs too weak to let me run. By the second month of my husband’s dark mood, a sliver of doubt entered my mind. Maybe this wasn’t a phase, a rage-filled reaction to the unfairness of illness. By the third month, I learned not to breathe too loudly.

In the days that followed each outburst, I spoke only when necessary. I kept my tone neutral and polite. When his empty oatmeal bowl scraped the bottom of the sink, I jumped. His spoon clattered onto the kitchen table and I flinched. I watched him from the living room out of the corner of my eye as he opened the microwave door. The tension had dissipated from his eyebrows and his shoulders. He wasn’t making more noise than anyone else would. But even the tiniest sounds sent jolts of alarm through my body.

The month before I moved out of the house I shared with my husband, I stumbled across a roach lying on its back on the kitchen floor. Its legs waggled as it squirmed, a black mark on the white kitchen tile. I gasped and hopped back, then immediately texted my husband.

“Bug. Please help!!!”

My heart slammed against my ribcage. I reminded myself that the insect in front of me was one thousandth of my size. Then for the first time, I began to consider which is scarier: facing a roach, or being dependent on a man who isn’t able to control his actions.

I looked down at the roach contrasted against the white tile. It had stopped twitching. If I use a broom and a long handled dustbin, I can dump it into the trash while still staying as far away as possible, I thought. As the insect slid into the wastebasket, I realized that this was the first roach, dead or alive, that I’ve ever disposed of on my own.

I knew that roach would be the first of many I handled. To my surprise, hope flickered on like a light in a dark house.

There is a hole in the wall.

There is a hole in the wall in front of me.

There is a hole in the concrete block wall about shoulder height in front of me.

My mind returns slowly.

I am sitting in bed in the basement of my parent’s house staring at a hole in the wall.

The hole is in the middle of a pale gray cinderblock, far away from the mortar. The hole is small, pencil-sized, and conical. There are grains in various stages of falling out of the hole, but I do not help them stay or fall. I cannot move.

My abdomen hurts, the pain dull and deep. I try to remember why, but my mind skitters away, like a foot placed awkwardly on ice.

I don’t know how long I have been staring at the hole. It’s been hours, I think. No one has come into the basement while I’ve been here.

I need to go to the bathroom, but I do not move. Somehow, my body and brain are disconnected. Something’s happened. I don’t know what.

I want Ronnie to be here, then I don’t. I remember him driving me today. I remember my heart breaking. I only lived with him so I wouldn’t be alone, but now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been before. Something vital is missing. My mind skitters across the ice again.

Now I can turn my head.

I look at the phone squatting on my nightstand. It’s a rotary one. Tan.

Should I call someone? I still can’t move.

I think about the last three months with Ronnie. Being seventeen, he supplied me with alcohol, pills, cocaine and speed, even though I don’t like speed. I remember becoming depressed, alone in his little apartment while he worked. I wanted to die, but I was too tired to try anything.

The pain is strong. The nurse said I’d be sore for a while. She said to take ibuprofen and use a heating pad.

Slowly, slowly, I flex my fingers. Can I move yet? Yes. A little.

I lean to the side and grasp the phone’s handset. I manage to pick it up, but I am so confused I put it back down and stare at the hole again.

I’m glad I’m not with Ronnie anymore. But who else can I talk to? Who else can I tell? I’ve committed a great crime. My mind does not skitter away. I think long about what I’ve done. I think about the hole inside me. There was no other way. There was no one else to help. I did too many drugs. I was too afraid. For me, for it. My face is wet. Tears.

It occurs to me that I can call my friend Tess. She will know how to help.

It takes me a while to remember Tess’s number.

I lift the receiver and dial. First one number: Click, click, click, click, click. Then the next, each click counting out the number until I spin the dial again.

“Hello?” she answers, but I can’t speak. I make a croaking sound.

“Who is this?”

I croak again.

“Kelley? Is this Kelley?”

“Me.” I whisper.

But she hears me. And she understands.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Tess is my angel.

I stare at the hole some more. She is coming. It’s a start.

I will be okay again.

Despite being stuck between relief and grief.

Despite the abortion.

I keep a noose at my house. It’s been there for six months now. I don’t even remember buying it, but I must have. I keep it hidden away from my dad. Oh, if he found my noose, he’d kill me. It’s in my underwear drawer, the usual hiding spot of choice for a teenager’s stolen bottle of vodka, or a borrowed pack of cigarettes. We’re all killing ourselves; some people are just less obvious about it. I’m not a kid anymore though so my angst is misplaced, or so I’m told. You’re supposed to stop feeling that after you turn eighteen. Deny yourself the luxury of despair, that’s for the youth. You are allowed minimal excitement when you have a holiday off work, or when you can stop paying child support.

The silly thing is, if I get around to it, I wouldn’t use the noose. I’ve looked all over the house, and there is just not a good spot to do the thing. The living room wouldn’t work, just look at the name. The kitchen would be unsanitary, obviously. The laundry room? Too dark. I don’t want to die in the dark. I’d like to see some light before I go and all I get to see is the dark. My bedroom would be perfect but there’s nothing there to hang the noose on that would support me. Command strips can only do so much. The tree in the back would work but then the neighbors, Jack and Lola, would have a front-row seat to the ugly relief I was performing, and I wouldn’t want to do it in front of them, that’d be in poor taste I think. Jack’s wife, Lola, makes lovely zucchini bread, and I just couldn’t do that to somebody who makes such lovely zucchini bread. She’ll probably make some for my dad if I ever finally do it. He’d be real nice about it too. He wouldn’t say a word I’m sure, but he’d nod, and they’d nod and hand him the aluminum tin with tiny little smiles and big sad eyes, he’d set it on the counter, and he’d let it go stale because zucchini bread was my favorite.

I wouldn’t use the noose. I wouldn’t slit my wrist either, too messy. I don’t want to leave a mess. A lady I knew once told me before that women don’t like to leave messes when they kill themselves. She said it proudly as if it is admirable to blow your brains out as long as you put a tarp down. I’d like to go as clean as a nun’s conscience though, that is true. Jumping off a bridge or a building is risky. If you don’t land right, you could survive and be a vegetable. Even if you do succeed now some poor guy has to mop you off the sidewalk and I don’t want that. I’d like to think me being gone will clean up a lot more lives than it messes up. So, what is the solution?

Pills. I’d swallow a bunch of pills. Aspirin will do the trick I think if you take a lot. I considered bleach too, but I read that you throw up a lot when you drink bleach, and again, I don’t want to leave a mess. So, aspirin then. I’d swallow a bunch, gulp ’em down quick before I lost my nerve. Then I would wait. I assume the dark would come, nice and steady. And I guess that’d be it. I’d be nothing more than a reason for a neighbor to make zucchini bread.

I want to tell somebody, to tell anybody, so bad. I want to tell someone that I think I’m dead already, the part that matters anyway. She died when she learned “I love you” wasn’t a promise, when she found out not every mother has to love her daughter, and not every girl gets to be pretty. So now I’m stuck here, in this shell, doing my best, making so many messes and I am so sorry I keep making all these messes. I’ll just make one more, then I’ll go, and no one will ever have to clean up after me ever again. Promise. But I can’t tell anybody because the words coming out of my throat hurt more than the noose going around it. My body has an appetite now for the relief, just like hunger or thirst it yearns for the long sleep. I could use a long sleep.

I’ve tried for so long to be who I used to be. I restart myself again, and again but my system is incapable of a reboot. Should I stay or should I go? It makes me nauseous to swallow “what ifs” and choke on possibilities. There is so much of me that wants to put myself to sleep one last time, but there is one thing that keeps me from doing it.

Dad.

You’d let the zucchini bread go stale.