Homeless Dog

Teri Lyn Smith

Winter 1999

 

The wife of an alcoholic resembles a starving dog chained to a homeless man. The wife and the dog would do better if they could get free.

 

But like that dog, the wife is chained by her loyalty to the relationship. For her, love long dead is replaced by responsibility. Depression takes on a life of its own. Social interactions are replaced by mute resolve to live quietly in the shadows so as not to become conspicuous.

 

The wife of Lot was doomed by her veneer of salt. So too the wife of the alcoholic, who lives encased in a shell of dead feelings that drape from her body like scale. She has the appearance now of stone.

 

Expressions of joy do not exist here. For joy would need love to grow but this woman has none apart from the watery memory of herself which she keeps in a bottle tightly corked. She watches daily for some signal that her life will begin. She is a half century old yet has no life outside her bottle.  She has dreams but her dreams are for the night and the night is the only time she can be free. In her dreams she is free.

 

Her jailer though is not the one sleeping beside her but the one inside. The binding ties are knotted by her own hands. The keys to her release are hung near the door and when she wakes she takes them down and dutifully locks herself in again.