Longing in the Liminal Space

An anonymous personal essay about infidelity and itches that want to be scratched

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We’re honored to publish this essay, “Longing in the Liminal Space” from a writer who wishes to be anonymous.

At some point she noticed the bottom of her left foot began to itch. Every night she scratched at it with the big toe of her right, to no relief. She typed into the navigation bar “left foot itching spiritual meaning” and the machine told her it was foretelling of embarking on a new adventure (weren’t all spiritual signs some variation of this?) but that it would be a journey that would lead to loss (somehow, the reading was more positive if the itch was on her right foot, but this was not the case). She dismisses this warning, as people tend to dismiss negative news, thinking they will be the exception, that they are somehow protected from succumbing to fate. 

She realizes the itch began shortly after she entered her seventh year of marriage. She thinks about the saying “the seven-year itch,” but does not think these two things, the saying and the itch, are related. She does not think this saying applies to her. She is happy with her husband, happy with her home, no matter how quiet it is, the effort of filling it tucked away tightly like a bed sheet under the weight of a mattress corner.

Photo by WC So on Unsplash

The first record she has of him sliding into her DMs she was recovering from surgery related to infertility. He has been there like this, she realizes, as a comfort. An acquaintance, a friend she knows in real life that she sees mostly online, each reaction like a hug, the well wishes briefly embracing her before continuing to scroll, to switch over to the next app, to return to the daily bustle of real life. It continues like this steadily, then increases with great frequency during the pandemic — perhaps as a way of coping with the absurdity of the times they found themselves in, each locked away in their houses with their separate spouses, reaching out across the everything hoping someone would be on the other side to catch them, to hold their thoughts for them, if only temporarily. 

There is nothing wrong with her marriage, she thinks. Her husband is perfect. She does not deserve him. She is lucky, they tell her. She is lucky, she believes. She realizes, perhaps, this feeling that it’s all a matter of luck, that she is undeserving otherwise, may be part of the problem.

The story replies slowly grow more suggestive. Maybe she was subconsciously posting in hopes for his reply, but how can one ever know their subconscious in the moment it happens. At some point, she blushes to herself, thinks, perhaps, they are flirting. Moving beyond the sphere of friendship into something that is just for them, enclosed in these private messages. Soon, the conversation doesn’t end. They don’t have to wait for one another to post a story to react to. They are speaking consistently, learning more and more about each other than they have in the years prior, even when they had met up for work-related coffees and at local bar patios where they both drank too many beers among separate groups of friends in the hot afternoon sun.

They discuss their struggles with anxiety. With drinking. With phone addiction. With replacing one addiction with another, not realizing the addiction they are currently forming is with each other. Perhaps they know this. Perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge it. Don’t want to fix it. At least, not yet.

The next day she fights with her husband in the mundane way married couples fight: he wants to see his friends, she expresses her hesitation due to the rapid spread of an increasingly contagious virus. He says, annoyed, “Fine, I won’t go,” and she says, passive aggressively, “No, go.” And after a bit of back and forth of this, he goes, and she is partially excited by it because it means she can turn her full attention to the man in her phone. 

Throughout all of this, she suspects she is having a bit of a nervous breakdown. She is no longer speaking to her parents. Her grandmother is dying. She quit her high-powered job a few months prior, burnt out to the point of exhaustion, spending the days instead writing about how she is no longer speaking to her parents and about how her grandmother is dying. It is getting easier for her to remove things from her life, to express they were never meant to be there to begin with. She has a problem feeling and accepting love. She expects it to be perfect. She expects herself to be perfect. She is now, she muses, a listless housewife. “You are more than that,” her best friend tells her. “You are more than that,” her husband reassures her. But she still cannot stop thinking it. She dresses herself up in glitter. A trophy. Always someone’s trophy. Waiting to be possessed. Earned. Rubbed until the shine has worn off and then tossed aside.

“Are we flirting?” she asks the man in her phone, and he confirms. For several days where she’s woken up thinking of him, consumed by thoughts of him, this pulling at her from somewhere else beyond the walls of her confinement. He recounts the night they met over 10 years ago, before she even met her husband, recalling with vivid memory what she was wearing. She redescribes the outfit to him, and before they both can help it, they are describing what they want to do to each other. Things have, as they say, escalated quickly.

He tells her the meaty enjoyments of his life are missing, and it’s perhaps not entirely due to the pandemic. They allow each other to see the cracks in their marriages. Share how no one can be all things to one person. They are both so needy. So full of wanting. Maybe what they are doing is a good thing, they say, twisting their excuses until they feel comfortable. She pulls two disturbing tarot cards that feel like a warning, but again, she dismisses their advice.

Soon, they are sending each other goodnight and good morning texts. She tells him when she is wet below, which is now seemingly constant. He tells her she has awoken something in him. The virus continues its spread, reaching nearly everyone it seems except for her and her husband, the walls around them closing in, but she is too busy hiding herself away alone in their bedroom, spreading her legs and touching herself. Of course she worries. About her grandmother. About the emptiness. She turns to him. Not her husband, him. She likens herself as his digital mistress. He lives in her head and in her phone, each notification a flutter, everything feeling at once very real and unreal. She feels drunk, out of control, in a cloud, though she gave up actually drinking years ago, in part, or mainly, because she worried she’d find herself in exactly this situation and be unable to stop.

They have sex, in a way, the only way you can on a messaging app. She sends a photo of herself in lingerie. He sends her his cock. She sends him her naked breasts, biting a strand of pearls. He suggests a coffee. They talk about what that means. They talk about how much they enjoy each other. They do not talk about what this means. This is how quickly it can happen, she thinks, for everything to unravel. For the train to depart without realizing she was headed in the wrong direction.

She questions, again, if this is indicative of something wrong in the relationship with the man whose ring she wears, something she never noticed before. But it is, she knows, the something within herself that is askew, that she’s long recognized and each time quickly tampered down. It is neither solvable by the man who gave her the ring nor by the one in her phone. It is only solvable by herself, which of course, is the hardest part.

Her foot still itches. But no matter how hard she scratches, the feeling never fully goes away.