This Water is my Blood

Connor Murphy was a waste of a human being. Just ask him, he’d tell you. His wife, Sarah, was better than him by any common socially used standard. Take anything – intelligence, achievement, career, social skills, and so on – overwhelmingly more likely than not, he would be lacking in comparison to her. That’s not to say that this is a story of envy. No, Connor’s sin was slightly different.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and Connor had an awful hangover. He had spent the night drinking with a friend, and now his entire existence was agony. Having relieved his nausea in his unfortunate friend’s bathroom, he was now returning home. While hangover cures did exist, he didn’t have any on him, and he was the sort to swear off the stuff anyway. As such, with the worst headache of his life, he pushed his way into his and his wife’s apartment. While taking his shoes off, Connor noticed that Sarah was still sleeping, which was quite unusual for her. He gave a weak smile at the sight.

“She deserves the rest.”

Mentally running through potential hangover cures, Connor landed on the oldest and simplest: simply drinking more. Navigating past the strewn beer bottles, he shuffled to his cabinet and swung the door open wide. Despite his pounding headache and sense that the world had turned into a very quickly-rotating disco ball, he did find it notably odd that the liquid in most of his bottles was seemingly of a different colour – or, rather, they now seemed colourless. Nonetheless, he overlooked this discrepancy as a trick of the eye… or perhaps a trick of the annoyingly painful photophobia he had just developed. In any case, he pulled out a bottle and placed it in the cabinet’s automatic bottle opener. Finally, hearing a suspiciously quiet hiss, he raised the beer to his mouth and…

“Fuck!”

Connor let out a yell of frustration as he realised that it was ice-cold soda water. Of course, as any regular hangover victim could tell you would happen, he quickly regretted doing so as he then immediately experienced the backlash for that noise from the pounding in his skull. Instinctively taking a step back, he found himself placing his foot on a suspiciously cylindrical object, before feeling a suspiciously glass-toned crunch as he put his weight down. First, realisation of what he had just done came to him, shortly followed by a sharp jolt pain. Now burdened by an abomination of a hangover and the pain of having his foot cut, he jolted forward, only to collide with the still-opened refrigerated cabinet. If this were a movie, then it is likely that the Blue Danube Waltz would have just begun playing.

From the eyes of Connor, the world seemed to slow to a crawl as he watched his entire collection topple onto him. Many a bottle slammed into him, some breaking in the process to inflict him with lacerations. Some crashed into the ground, shattering and offering Connor even more cuts. Connor had become the centre of a truly malevolent kitchen. After it concluded, he willingly collapsed onto the shard-covered ground, his hangover symptoms giving way to pain. He could only think one thing:

“I’m a waste.”

He didn’t pay attention to Sarah as she forced a healing capsule into his mouth, nor did he pay any attention to the clean-up process. Wallowing in himself, Connor could only remain silent.

===

I looked at the scene in front of me with horror after Sarah let me in to the apartment. A drenched man had a vacant expression as he curled up on his bed on the far side of the room with numerous cuts – albeit visibly healing cuts – across his body. Glancing at the cabinet, I didn’t need it explained to me to understand the gist of what had happened, nor did I need anyone to tell me that this was my fault. I knew. I couldn’t escape this with the excuse that the Lord was restraining my operational limits. This was entirely my doing.

This is a fuck up.

I had cursed him, yet I had by no means intended to harm him like this. Of course, he would be fine after the healing capsule Sarah had fed him allowed his natural recovery, but nonetheless, the pain I had caused wouldn’t fade. But even beyond that, a quiet voice in my heart whispered something else: I won’t be able to convert Sarah anymore. All of this meant that even if she believed I was a prophet capable of miracles, I would have also been the woman who had hurt her husband. As such, I reached one conclusion.

I need to leave.

As I stiffly started to turn to leave, a teary-eyed Sarah grabbed my shoulder.

“I don’t know what else to do… he also seems badly hungover, but we don’t have any medicine. I….”

She clearly wants my help. But she can’t help with my mission anymore, and…. Pausing in consideration, I finally turned back to look at Connor. Sarah had already cleaned the glass around him, and his wounds were clearly healing. There was no miracle I could use that would be relevant in this situation. Even if I cured his hangover, the true underlying problem would remain. No matter how hard I wished for it, this problem could not be solved by the divine. I wasn’t useful here. I looked at Sarah.

“I don’t think I can help here.”

At that, Sarah’s already teary face grew even more desperate.

“But still…!”

I didn’t understand what she wanted from me. It felt like there was a fundamental incompatibility of the software in each of our brains preventing me from comprehending what she needed. I scratched my chin in thought. I recalled words I had heard previously, in another place.

“Elysia, above all you must be kind.”

Sarah took advantage of my pause to beg me once again.

“Please… I need a friend right now. I know we just started talking yesterday, but I just….”

A friend…? I still don’t understand what she wants from me. Friendship? Are we friends? How can I use friendship to help them here? No, that aside… I still can’t rationally justify getting closer to them now; it just isn’t…. But as if to ignore my rapid-fire thoughts, my hand moved on its own to gently grab and squeeze the hand she had placed on my shoulder. Without warning, Sarah placed me in a bear hug and began to sob into my chest. Sarah was a head shorter than me, so she fit quite comfortably. To be perfectly honest, this move surprised me, but once again, I couldn’t say that this warmth was a particularly unpleasant feeling. Remarkably, despite my continued silence, she continued to talk at me.

“I was too hard on him. I didn’t want him to leave. I just hated watching him be… like that.”

Ah. As Sarah continued to ramble, I finally realised the extent of my earlier misunderstanding. Sarah wasn’t resentful of him because he was making a mess of their apartment. She was mad at him because she loved him. The downward spiral of a loved one like Connor could have only hurt to watch. Love… what a messy emotion.

Even with that, that still left the question of Connor. What led him down? Why was he acting like he was? My eyes narrowed as I arranged the information I had in my mind. I began to work backwards. He was hungover; hence he had been drinking last night. But why? He had walked off at the end of the argument I had observed. As an unemployed person, he likely couldn’t afford to stay in a bar overnight – especially since Sarah was unlikely to be lending him funds at this point in their relationship. So, did he drink with a friend like Sarah did with me? If he just wanted to leech off of Sarah, then wouldn’t it be more efficient and less argument-inducing to try moving in with one of those friends? Recalling the specific words that had set Connor off at the end of the argument, my eyes widened as I finally arrived at a likely conclusion. Maybe I can help. Carefully separating Sarah from me, I spoke to her.

“Couldn’t he have felt like he felt that there was an imbalance in your relationship?”

Sarah tilted her head slightly.

“After you married him despite him being a drop-out, Connor probably initially felt like he wasn’t good enough for you. His coping mechanism with that discomfort was to shut himself in. With you then responding to that by trying to pressure him into leaving his shell, his feelings would have twisted into some kind of resentment, leading to new behaviours in a kind of feedback loop.”

Sarah’s face rapidly grew forlorn.

“So I did this to him…?”

“No. I’m just saying that you need to talk to him. This was caused by both of your poor communication.”

They couldn’t slip back into bottling up their own feelings. I softly pushed Sarah towards Connor and gave her a meaningful look. Sarah, understanding my meaning, turned her attention to Connor and moved towards his bed. I turned my back when I heard them begin to speak and slowly began to walk away. I heard Connor break out into loud tears along with Sarah. I closed my door on the way.

I’m sorry, Sarah. This is all I can do for you. The Lord’s power is too far weakened to grant you a guaranteed happy ending, so you must create that miracle yourself.

For the first time in my life, I prayed for another person.