I always thought Ralphie was handsome. Our first date was at an Applebee’s in East Orange. I had tap water with ice, he had the house cocktail: a mug of viscous blue syrup with a single despondent gummy shark sunken at the bottom. The gummy shark made me believe in God. I wanted to gnaw on it until I lost a tooth. I wanted Ralphie to think me secular.

I couldn’t stop pulling that yellow foamy stuff out of a tear in the leather booth–you know the stuff I’m talking about. I kept tearing it out, even while Ralphie was talking, balling the yellow strands into my messenger bag and thinking about the new and exciting life path I had chosen for myself. I almost pulled off a loose thread of my skirt. I thought about it unraveling, my bare thighs against the sweaty vinyl seat, and how that feeling might bring me closer to my New God. The waitress came to take our order and mentioned a big quesadilla special. I said, oh boy, Ralphie, can we! Can we please get the big quesadilla special! He said, sure, baby. You get ten quesadillas if you want. It’s all on Big Ralphie.

From then on, it really was all on Big Ralphie. He owned a shower door business that really was quite profitable. I would go to my teaching job like a little princess knowing my eunuch bodyguard would be waiting for me in the parking lot in a MR. SHOWER DOOR van.

My job was hard. The children didn’t respect me. I tried to use the humiliation of being so infantilized to bring myself closer to God. During lunchtime, I would self-flagellate in the teachers lounge. I would eat one Triscuit to unlock the other 90% of my brain.

Ralphie told me not to complain, he told me some people don’t have jobs and some people aren’t dating Mr. Shower Door. I almost told him about my big religious plans but instead I just watched him watching River Monsters. I tried to picture what God looked like. For some reason, I imagined a wedding ice sculpture carved into a swan but melting so, so fast. He was dripping away and becoming littler every moment, giving me all of his water to drink up. I was so hydrated. I had felt that this ice sculpture had been real ever since our first date at the East Orange Applebee’s, ever since the gummy shark bobbed to the bottom of Ralphie’s glass. Don’t ask me to explain myself because some things are simply beyond the realm of all logical possibility.

Ralphie became my husband, and later an opera singer. He could not manage any Pavarotti but sometimes he could do a little bit of Caruso. He practiced his scales once a week and the rest of the time he ordered Big Deals and Big Saves from all our local fast food places, 10 million gray-scaled burgers and dripping Oreo McFuck milkshakes piling up at our humble doorstep. He would slurp down his lard and say, God, this lard is incredible. Thank God for these Big Deals and Big Saves.

Sometimes, I would go on long drives through East Orange while listening to rock music instead of praying. I couldn’t tell Ralphie about my new hobby because he only believed in opera. One time someone played Pearl Jam at a christening we were attending and he started screaming. If I was feeling really indulgent on one of my drives, I would pick up a head of iceberg lettuce at the store and eat it while parked by the riverbank doing my self-flagellations. I would consider the loons craning their long necks to the sun and the rabbits hopping through the deadened brush of wintered New Jersey. I would consider that I had to teach my middle school class The Great Gatsby the next Monday. I would consider killing myself.

On our honeymoon at the Borgata in Atlantic City, I asked Ralphie if he really thought I was beautiful. I didn’t want to be worshipped like a Pantene model or anything crazy like that. I wanted to be considered the way you might look at a painting of outer space in a doctor’s office. A quiet nod, tacit appreciation. He told me to shut up, he ate five hard-boiled eggs at once, and I drank a little more God’s water.

When I was a little girl, my mom said that if I didn’t wear a helmet while riding my bike, my head would crack like an egg. I thought that if an egg was determined to crack, it could do so under any circumstances. The pressure of the universe and the knowledge of God could always be bearing down upon the egg. The yolk could fill up a whole helmet.

Natalie Cahill is a New York City-based screenwriter, WGAE member, and MFA candidate at Columbia University. You can find her on Instagram at @marmalade__enjoyer.