Habib 33

Tilda

By Ayesha Habib

Tilda had succumbed to eating Harold’s old love letters to his dead wife. Hunched over naked in the closet, she gnawed on ink and memory, hungry for the tenderness and affection Harold saved only for his grief.

She had first discovered the letters a year ago while searching his office closet for a tweed overcoat to repair. Instead, tucked behind stacks of Harold’s old ornithology journals, Tilda found the nostalgia of past love, the careful preservation of which felt worse than the letters themselves. If they had been thrown into a shoebox, messy and out of order and dust-gathered and still sturdy from lack of touch, there would still be hope. But these letters were adored, neatly and chronologically stacked in a little wooden chest, glowing and self-assured and limp from tender fingertip touches. Teardrop-shaped wrinkles scattered themselves across the paper, some still wet, where words morphed into tendrils of black ink.

Her discovery had confirmed something Tilda was terrified to admit in the course of her and Harold’s three-year relationship: she could not compare to that dead woman.

There were hundreds of letters, not counting the Post-it notes and shopping lists sprawled with dirty jokes and proclamations of undying love, spanning a thirty-year marriage that began at the edge of adolescence and ended under the cruel fluorescent light of the oncology ward. Tilda read each letter in secret, in stolen moments when Harold was at the grocer's or surveying the gulls down by the rocky shore. When he returned, she ran the tap in the bathroom to cover the sounds of her retching.

The more she read, the clearer the picture became, and the sicker, and yet more aroused, she felt. For a while, she hinted at nothing about her findings, biting her cheeks to keep the tic-like grin from spreading over her face. Only at night, watching Harold sleep—his slow breathing, the lines on his face smooth from his stillness—would she give in to her thoughts. It was easy to imagine him as a young man like this; he looked so small, unfettered. She pictured a clumsy boy, all limbs and teeth in bed. She imagined the hasty way he might have made love, tripping over himself to grab every piece of flesh he could. Now, at sixty-two years old, Harold only fucked in missionary, occasionally from behind when his knees allowed it, and thrust with the rhythm of a rocking chair. Sometimes, when they made love, his tears falling on her face, she closed her eyes and pictured his wife in her place instead. It gave her a strange, out-of-body sensation that made her both giddy and terribly sad.

This wasn’t the first time Tilda fantasized about Harold’s past, but the letters now added striking clarity and detail to what she had built in her mind, what she had gleaned from Harold’s deliberate vagueness whenever the topic arose. Harold never explicitly spoke about his dead wife, but she was always there, in his permanent tears, his constant nose-blowing. Whenever an offhand we came up in an anecdote— that was before we put the downpayment on the cottage—Tilda felt his dead wife’s presence in the telling absence of his unspoken words. Then there were the times Harold would have an opinion that seemed so out of character— Patriotism is a disease, we should abolish all national anthems if you ask me—Tilda knew that it was a regurgitation, that it was his wife’s convictions that burned hot while Harold warmed himself on her embers. Sometimes Tilda wondered if the mystery of their marriage—this piecing together of a past life—kept her with Harold. The letters filled in the blanks, but there was no satisfaction in actually knowing everything, every pet name, every fight and reclamation of devotion, every ode to slender collarbones, constellations of freckles, and snowflake-dappled eyelashes.

In the months it took for Tilda to read each letter, her condition had returned worse than it had ever been. By the time Harold found her naked in his closet, she was overcome with such hysterical laughter that it broke the skin on her lips, and blood trickled into the wads of paper lodged between her teeth.

Tilda first met Harold in a pub on the outskirts of a small town by a raging sea. There, amongst the fishermen who smelled of lobster and leather, a discordant orchestra rose above the din: his mournful wailing and her mad cackle. They stood like this, looking at each other for several moments, unable to speak for shock at seeing themselves so clearly reflected in each other. They were two halves of the same coin: she could not stop laughing, and he could not stop crying. Their realization of this sparked respective fits of giggles and tears.

They found each other through a local online disability group, where the other members suspected them of faking their conditions, perhaps as part of a coordinated prank. When they were both kicked out of the group after one too many bouts of laughter and sobs interrupted a video session, they decided to meet in person, despite being suspicious of each other and the veracity of their pixelated selves. The coincidence of their symmetrical afflictions was too neat. And yet if it was true, it was as if they were meant to join, to sit side-by-side if only for the visual poetry of the sight. Like those Greek theatre masks, one laughing and one crying.

Tilda wore red lipstick to match the blood in the cracks of her lips, chapped by tight smiles; Harold wore a daisy in the buttonhole of his tweed coat and combed his grey hair back until it flicked up at the base of his thick neck—little efforts to dilute the harshness of their conditions.

Their compulsions were uncontrollable, sporadic—like muscle spasms, tics. It gave them both an unnerving air that put most people off.

“These days, I can control it fairly well, though. I’ve learned to swallow most of it—except when I’m feeling a lot. It still lives in the back of my throat. It’s always kind of rearing itself,” Harold said that day in the pub, once their fits had settled and they were able to get a table in the corner of the darkened room, away from the patrons who had twisted their necks to gaze at the curious pairing. He let out a little sob like a hiccup.

He looked a bit like a gnome; there was a ruddy quality. His eyelids were swollen and purple like ripe grapes. White spittle had dried in the corners of his lips, and two lines of snot embedded permanent lines from his nostrils to his cupid's bow. Fresh hot tears sprouted from the corners of his eyes, and Tilda imagined a faint acid-like sizzle as they dripped down his raw skin.

“I’m the same way,” she said. “I’m always chewing the insides of my cheeks to keep it all in.”

He pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket, folded it into a neat square, and politely dabbed the corners of his eyes, then the sweat on his brow. It was an ordinary movement, so instinctual to him that he barely registered the action, and yet to Tilda, it exposed something purely human within. She suddenly wilted with tenderness at the thought of his sweat, his tears. It comforted her, this cordial demeanor, this subtle reveal of gentleness within. It softened his harsh features. He was a little schoolboy in an old man’s body. How sweet. Laughter chirped in her throat.

They spoke for a long time at their little table in the corner of the pub, until the other patrons became bored with them and no longer leered. They discussed how life had split, for both of them, quite neatly into two halves—a before and an after, with a harsh dividing line of disability. He told her about his ornithological research, a failed book about the migration patterns of neotropical birds, a stalled career after a prestigious grant. She spoke of divorce, failures in fertility, the elementary school she once taught at before the parents started to complain.

Tilda did not ask Harold, on that first day, about his dead wife. She knew that grief was the cause of his condition from the little he spoke during their online support group sessions. She was worried that if she brought up the dead wife, something that was only just starting to form between them—a fragile, warm thing—would break apart and die, and there would be no coming back from that. They would simply be two people in a room, telling their stories—sharing coping strategies and repeating platitudes—no different than a support group circle. But Tilda knew, biting her lip so hard as not to burst into high-pitched giggles, that everything in her life had led her here, to this dark pub, to meet this crying man, and to wipe his tears away herself.

Tilda was always an anxious woman. Her ex-husband once said she made the air static-y, like the sound of a radio between two stations—as if her nerves snatched the air around her body and created a vacuum of panic everywhere she went.

When her symptoms began, he found her unbearable. Her lips were always cracked and scabby, and every few minutes, she involuntarily broke out into an enormous smile that erupted with bright beads of fresh blood. But her eyes were terrified, exhausted, like an animal pleading to be put out of its misery. When he left her after a decade of unhappiness, she laughed so hard she started convulsing, to which he only looked on in disgust.

At first, being with Harold calmed Tilda. Perhaps it was because his condition seemed so much more real than hers. It was tangible; there was a clear cause and effect. What’s more, it was beautiful, poetic. Hers was an abstraction that confused and horrified her. Harold once told her that it must have been because she felt such joy that she was like this—as if her condition could be reasoned with the way his was. But it felt more volatile than that. It was nervous laughter. Like when something so terrible happens, your body’s first reflex is to laugh because crying isn’t honest enough.

Tilda could anchor herself in Harold. He was steadfast and kind, yet childlike, which stirred a maternal yearning in her affection. A few months into their courtship, she moved into his home, a little cottage just outside the main town, surrounded by gentle green slopes on one side and a glittering sea on the other. There, she flourished with him, tending to the cracks of his life with a domestic tenacity. She made the kitchen smell of rosemary and thyme. She organized the piles of field notes, glossaries, and research papers strewn across Harold’s office desk and floor. She came up with solutions to ailments Harold had long accepted as a reality of his wet, snot-filled life: tissues saturated with calming aloe for his chafed nostrils, saline eyedrops to rinse his acid eyes, and salt tablets twice a day to replenish his wrung-out tear ducts.

“Ahhh,” Harold sighed in relief, rolling out a slimy tapeworm-esque string of snot from his right nostril with the aloe tissues. “It’s coming out of my brain, it feels… ha!” He took a loud, clear sniff. “I can smell the sea. God, that’s wonderful.” The camaraderie of their conditions erased any embarrassment when it came to bodily fluids; it established an intimacy that ran parallel to their otherwise formal behaviour.

Watching him at that moment, his demeanour so earnestly pleased, Tilda felt so much love that it made the blood rush to her ears, and the hot, gushing sound drowned all other noise out, distracting her neurosis. The more she settled into Harold, the better her condition became. Her pained mirth eased; she could breathe through a laughing fit by simply repeating his name in her head. Harold. Harold. Harry. She developed an inner glow that restored her vitality. In the mirror, she could catch glimpses of her younger self if she tilted her head slightly up and to the left. She was able to turn her pained smile, for a few moments, into the downward pout that defined the youthful, sulky face that caught her ex-husband’s eye so many years ago, that drew him from across a crowded dancefloor to ask in whiskey-breathed words, Why so sad and alone, sweetheart? Give us a smile, now.

She could, in those first months with Harold, ignore that she was living another woman’s life, and it was for that woman that an unending procession of tears still dripped quietly down Harold’s face, despite Tilda’s devotion.

Over time, Tilda came to know Harold’s impenetrable quality. They were fastidious companions, spending every day in each other’s comfortable presence. They made love regularly and often gave each other little kisses on the cheek. But Harold’s affection was mechanical, more out of habit than deliberate—like the way he dabbed his sweat and tears that day at the pub. Muscle memory. Sometimes in his sleep, he would gather Tilda up in his arms and bury his face in her hair, and Tilda knew, from the way he’d roll away from her when he awoke—gently, but with an air of immeasurable sadness—that this intimacy was for another.

In the day, Harold was courteous—but almost skittish when faced with vulnerability—and Tilda followed his lead. He never said her name, rarely looked into her eyes. His mannerisms were always pleasant, never heated nor urgent with love or anger or passion. They floated on the surface of each other, but couldn’t quite push through. The polite, schoolboy way he measured his actions, which at first seemed so adorable to Tilda, now annoyed her. His formality rebuffed her attempts for closeness, it kept her at arm’s length.

His constant tears began to taunt her. They took the shape of his dead wife gliding down his face, licking his skin provocatively. Every sniffle at the breakfast table was a reminder of Harold’s unspoken allegiance.

Late at night, Tilda could hear Harold sobbing through this office door, where he locked himself most evenings to work on his research. When he quietly slinked back to bed and his snoring overtook the room, she would stare at the dark mass of his body and wonder how you could know the smell of someone’s skin so well, and they could still be a stranger.

After her discovery of the letters, Tilda slid into disrepair. Her laughing fits returned. When she felt one coming on, she’d stuff a hand towel into her mouth to muffle the sounds. She became fixated on the unknowability of lovers, parents, children, and friends. Could it be that the ones who love us most know us least?

Harold’s letters revealed a confidence and ardor Tilda had never seen before. She wondered if the words, the act of writing the letters, transformed Harold into a person that only existed in ink. Or was it a performance? Both the grief and the love. How do you know who a person truly is? She wondered if his dead wife found him unknowable too.

These days, she thought of Harold’s dead wife as much as Harold. There were moments, in her delirium of obsession, when she believed she was Harold’s dead wife and all this was a vision in the haze of death. Then, Tilda—as Harold’s dead wife—hated Tilda, the other woman in her home, snooping through her things. She’d wake up in cold sweats, terrified and confused, because she was supposed to be dead, but she kept on living. I don’t belong here, she pleaded to the ceiling, I don’t belong here. Then she’d laugh herself back to sleep. Harold, a heavy sleeper, would never be disturbed.

Tilda had always felt like she had arrived at the party too late, or left too early. She was always missing the best parts of things; her life was defined by peripheral experience. Her youth was wasted in meekness and daydreams, and then a paralyzing neurosis that hindered decisive action. She wondered, if she had met Harold before he met his wife, whether she would have been a different person, emboldened by a pure love. Then she could have died tragically, with some dignity, and some other poor, pathetic replacement would be shaving down their bunions to fit in her slim shoes.

The cruelty of it all was that Tilda knew what it felt like to be so close to the sun. She could feel the heat—the urgency in her blood like it was oil splattering in a pan—of Harold’s adoration. She just wanted to get closer, closer than anyone before her, to the source. She slipped out of bed in the heavy silence of early morning, leaving Harold snoring in bed, and went to his office closet to consume the memories of a life she could have experienced, but hadn’t the luck of getting to in time.

When Harold found her, day had broken through the dawn and speckles of dust floated through the air in the still room. She was naked. Her dimpled flesh seemed like clay that had been used by too many hands.

They looked at each other. She, with her bloody hyena mouth, and him, with fresh tears falling like pebbles on concrete at his feet. Tilda giggled uncontrollably until she was hacking and retching with laughter. On all fours, her back hunched up, she vomited pulpy bits of paper, like a cat with a hairball.

Harold sat next to her and rubbed her back, circular motions like a mother does. He wiped mushed-up bits of paper from the corners of her mouth and wrapped her body, now shivering, in the tweed jacket from his closet. He held her there on the floor, rocking back and forth, saying nothing, until her fit subsided. Until both their bodies were calm. Tilda looked up at Harold; his eyes were clear, no tears.

“If you were hungry, you could have just said.” A mischievous grin broke across his face.

They came together in a rush. He lifted her head and kissed her mouth hard. Tilda’s tears ran through her laugh lines; cracked lips rubbed against cracked lips. They made urgent love on the floor, bodies writhing among the half-eaten love letters.

Ayesha Habib is a writer, journalist, and photographer currently living in Toronto. Her work has been published in The Walrus, The Narwhal, The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve, and SAD magazine, as well as in the 2024 essay anthology Back Where I Came From (Book*hug Press). She has co-produced short documentaries for CBC and has self-published a prose and photography zine called papercut.

She can be found on Instagram and X under @ayeshajenna.