She Tried To Kill Me On Our Honeymoon

The scars still ache.

Photograph by Author

Blood poured across my chest, pooling across my lap as the knife shuddered in my shoulder.

I tried not to scream, but it’s hard not to when you’ve just been stabbed by a crazed person who, merely hours before, made you the happiest person on earth.

Welcome to the beginning of my first marriage.

The wedding was beautiful. Her parents went all out to make sure their daughter had everything she wanted. I took a back seat to a lot of the planning, which everyone was okay with.

Especially me.

I never wanted it to begin with.

See, the trouble is, the marriage wasn’t something I really wanted. I hadn’t planned for the events of my life to go the way they did, and found myself wholly inadequate to the occasion.

We discovered she was pregnant just a few months before the wedding.

Both of us were young. I, especially, was nowhere near mature enough to handle being married, much less a father. I was still dealing with the tumultuous ordeal of emotions my own abusive father left me with, and I could not fathom how I would be adequate for a kid.

Slinging pizzas for a living didn’t seem the right way to go with an infant on the way. How would I manage being able to afford the birth? I didn’t have insurance, and neither did she.

Diapers? Oh god, those things are expensive. Formula? Toys? Rent? How the hell was I supposed to do all of this?

The only reason I asked her to marry me was because I thought, at the time, it was the “right thing to do.” I was raised in a hyper-religious cult of a family. Having a child out of wedlock? I may as well have lit the bonfires of hell myself.

No. The last thing I wanted to do was get married, especially under those circumstances. I didn’t feel I had any choice in the matter, though, and if it made her and everyone else happy, I would not argue.

Marrying at 19 is tough enough. Tying the knot with what is tantamount to a shotgun in the face is even harder.