It's cold.
I'm cold.
Now that I thought about it, when did this "I" start to appear? At some point in our lives, we just started calling ourselves "I".
I'm full.
I'm sick.
I'm sad.
Why was that?
Where did it come from? Why did we refer to ourselves as "I"? People had around 6000 thoughts per day—they would have no day off. Assuming they referred to themselves as "I" half the time they ever experienced any thought, in a lifetime, a brain of a person living to 80 years could've produced up to 87 million thoughts where the person referred to themselves as "I".
87 million.
We said something 87 million times and we didn't even know what it meant.
Why was that?
Why did we do it?
Why did I do it?
I was doing it right now.
Why?
Who gave me the idea in the first place?
What am I?
Why am I here?
When your life was nearing its end, and you started to lose parts of yourself, to lose track of time, you'd change and become more appreciative of all the little things that had been given to you.
That was, of course, if you'd had something good going for you in the first place. And I'd had lots of great things going for me. A great job, a wonderful wife, all the times we'd eaten together.
We mostly ate out; although Margaret and I disagreed on many things, one of the few we'd agreed on was that the chefs made better food, hands down, every time.
Not that she didn't know how to cook, or was too lazy to prep a meal for me every day—Cooking was hard work. It was just that Margaret had a very distinct palate; she needed a full ladle of salt before she could taste anything. It wasn't ageusia, per se. She knew what she was eating most of the time. She just wanted the flavor to be intense.
Go big or go home, she'd often say to me.
She loved to make fried rice with diced steak, bell pepper and fries—no, not bell pepper. They were large, and their size was proportionate to how much they burned your throat.
The rice also tasted like chilies, and so were the steak and the fries. This was why I always had a cup of milk on the table whenever we ate at home. The drink was supposed to wash down the pain from eating, and hopefully cancel out the blood pressure-raising effect of all the salt that went into your bloodstream. I knew the sodium was there, but the spiciness stripped me of the ability to taste anything, let alone tell flavors apart.
Every time I flexed all the muscles on my face to keep it from shriveling up, Margaret would call me out, saying that I was weak, that I lacked the will and perseverance.
"Din, we'f oly eafin dinnr!" I'd often respond, mangling the words as I could not feel my tongue anymore because of the burning in my mouth.
She would then go off with her lecture on how life was war, and so was the food we ate. When we denied the intensity in the flavors and turned to the milder delicacies, we'd become soft and fragile. The delusion of temporary comfort would only make all the bad things in life all the more unpleasant. And so on.
In a way, she was right, if only she would just accept the fact that the human body had its limits, and that thousands of people died on their dinner table from salt poisonings every day.
The thing that astounded me the most was that Margaret seemed to be doing all right for now, considering the lethal amounts of salt she'd been putting into her system. She was an outlier, but I doubted she could keep up like this for fifty years.
Although I never complained—at least in front of her—she always knew that I never liked her cooking, which was why she was the one who suggested we eat out in the first place.
Margaret still cooked on a bi-weekly basis, because I asked her to. It was one of her biggest joys in life. Whenever she came out of the kitchen with a new dish, she had this obnoxiously proud look on her face—like she'd just ended world hunger on her way to the dining room.
Even though I hated it, I noticed that during such moments, she also looked genuinely happy.
And whenever we ate at our favorite restaurants, the condiments on the table were a must for her. The chefs were great and all, but their dishes were still lacking by her standards. Every time the food was brought out, she would vigorously shake and empty the entire bottle of hot sauce on her plate along with all the diced green chilies on our table. She was using so much hot sauce that the owner eventually had to switch to 150 ml bottles because he thought everybody was as crazy about it as she was. And then they had to use 350 ml bottles. They couldn't do anything about the chilies.
One restaurant even had to install a security camera inside the shop so they could see who was hogging all the chilies. They did it specifically because of her—the camera was installed right above our usual table in the back corner of the room.
Go big or go home.
Margaret was like that. The lengths she would go just to prove herself to the whole world, even when no one was looking.
What exactly she was trying to prove was beyond me.
She embarrassed me sometimes.
But then again—I hated to admit this—there were also times when I thought she was kind of cool.
I was taken by the bombastic flair she always put on for everyone to see. It was the confidence, the air of authority exuding from a middle-aged housewife who also believed, with all the conviction in the world, that she was an exceptionally beautiful woman.
On a special day, I would lean back on my chair, Margaret would be onto her shenanigans like pumping dozens of balloons on her own and hanging them around the house to celebrate herself, and while looking at her without her knowing, I'd shake my head and quietly tell myself, "That's my wife. I married that woman."
I was proud of her.
I was also deeply afraid.
There was nothing that she wouldn't do. Nothing was off-limit from her perspective.
The idea that she would do something like that, just to "win over" her brother and change his mind.
But what could I do about it? It was an arbitrary condition he'd set up, otherwise he would never have agreed to crack the message. He'd already said that she would have to kill him before he was going to help.
I couldn't confront him about it. I could only go along with everything and pretended like it wasn't really happening, as if there was nothing wrong in the world.
In truth, I didn't have the guts to ask. I couldn't bring up the topic and ask to his face, not only because I was afraid of the idea that he would request such a thing from her, his own sister. I was more terrified of the fact that she was willing to go through with it.
You were right, Josh. I don't know what she saw in me.
I'm sorry, Margaret.