Perfect Balance | Mark DeMoss
‘Do you remember the night we took off all our clothes and ran naked down University Boulevard?’ Julie had just awoken from a light, restless sleep, and turned over to see her husband’s face.
Joe reached over from the chair by the bed to thumb up Julie’s dosage. ‘That was a long time ago, and we were drunk. We drank too much then.’
In the past year, Julie’s emotions, both high and low, had often registered outside the maximum legal range. For the first few weeks, there were warnings, and then a case was opened, a nurse assigned.
‘Emotionalism is a serious condition,’ she’d said to Joe on her first weekly visit. ‘Much like a diabetic whose body becomes insulin resistant as she ages, your wife’s disease will only be more difficult to control over time. If you can’t manage it at home, we will have to put her in a professional facility.’
Julie propped her head on her elbow. ‘We were not drunk,’ she said. ‘We were in love, we were spontaneous. I wanted to see what you looked like without any clothes on. I felt wild, for the first time I could remember. I wanted to pull my heart out of my chest and throw it as far into the sky as I could, until it broke into millions of tiny pieces, like dandelion seeds, each one drifting off to a new life, a secret adventure.’
Joe frowned. Memories could cause spikes, but this memory intrigued him, tickled a dormant wildness in his own chest. ‘That was your idea?’