PTI4TMI

Her figure a shadow in the dark of the room behind him: what are you doing?

Nothing.
Show me your phone.
No.

She thinks it’s something worse than it is. Lewd videos perhaps. A text to a girlfriend. She grabs the phone.
He knows what he’s written won’t please her. He knows in any case whenever she takes the phone it’s a 2 hour game of find the trigger and she’ll become manic in the search for something to condemn him.
Give me my phone. You can’t take my phone. It’s illegal.
No I’m going to look.
Give it back. It’s illegal to take my phone. You just told your sister that.
Don’t touch me.
Give it back.
Don’t TOUCH me.
She goes down the stairs and he after her.

What were you doing?

It’s my diary. I don’t want you to read it. Give me back my phone. It’s illegal to take my phone.
I’m not stopping you from anything.
Yes you are. I want to make a call.
He grabs for it and she pulls away.
Don’t TOUCH me. No you don’t. LIAR.
Give me my phone.
The yelling awakens her father and he comes out if his room, sees the conflict. She is trying to place the phone in front of his face to unlock the locked notes and he takes the opportunity to grab it out of her hands. She loses it: claws at his back, tears his shirt soaked in sweat at the shoulder and it hangs on by a thread. It’s a miracle he manages to squeeze down the right button and use a voice command to call Pr D— and a miracle Pr D— picks up.
Give me the phone her father says in his dialect. He hands it to him amidst her flurry of flailing and scratching. His skin melts in the tropical heat of the unvented dining room. The Pastor is a saint and exhibits no discontent with such an inconvenience as this, to be called to mediate yet another fight at this hour and without any warning. She’s fervent when he agrees by the Pastor’s direction to hand her his phone and she hand him hers. She’s changed the passcode and he can’t unlock it until she tells him reluctant. But he doesn’t care either way. There’s nothing she could be hiding that would shock him, and he has never desired to play this game anyway, a game she commenced as early as the first week of their marriage, astounding him when she went through his social media for dirt on past relationships. The flags were always there and he would always look away.
He tells them both as much: I don’t want to go through your phone. I was writing in my diary.
She can’t help but bring her father into the mix.
Look what he’s written.
It’s his diary. So what?
They begin in their dialect. She starts to translate the entry he’d been composing and he feels a divine calm knowing this puts her in a pickle: sure enough she catches herself before recounting his words on their intercourse in detail, chooses to pause with a nervous laugh.
It’s how I manage my emotions. What do you do to manage your emotions?

She’s too livid to hear the question, analyze, respond. Just continues her doomscroll into the purgatory of his personal thoughts.

It’s 3 hours until 2:30 in the morning with the pastor coaching and her father on the sidelines. He wants so bad for this to not be his life. He had asked already several times in earnest for God to take him and end the pain and chaos but this feeling does not come back now. He’s tired of taking the blame for everything, being the scapegoat for all her sins on top of what he knows is keeping him separated from the Lord, for the sake of her ego trip, to continue her manic plateau. There’s no reasoning with her now but after 2 hours with the Pastor they cool off enough to let him sleep, and they too manage to go to the bedroom with the mosquito nets and the baby still asleep in the crib to retire. He sets blankets on the tile floor and takes his pillow and sleeps there, she on the bed, until he wakes up full of pins and needles and crawls in next to her under the net head to toe on the bed and somehow he sleeps.