Another mistake

I screwed up today. When I came home alone with pizzas, there was absolutely no room on the table to put them, just as there has been no room on it for the past five years because of all the junk my wife keeps piling on it. I sighed and started to begin the neverending process of getting all the useless junk off of it, piece by piece, but only a few seconds passed before I had enough. After 40+ straight days of work and 5+ years of constantly cleaning this damned table, I just moved the six bottles and glasses of liquid to the side, then swiped the rest of the junk onto the floor. Medicine bottles, a tape dispenser, junk mail, tissues, capped bottles, food packages and much more went flying to the ground. I briefly considered cleaning it up, but decided against it, because I'm tired of being the butler in this house, especially when most of the messes aren't mine.

My wife came back and was pretty shocked. "What happened?!" she asked worriedly. Without looking at her, I answered, "I'm tired of cleaning the junk off this table." She didn't say another word, and instead started to pick up the mess I made in silence. I was an a-hole and I felt like it, but even after she had cleaned up, my wife was acting super nice to me again.

I told myself almost a month ago that I had to stop being the Iceman because she had cleaned up her act towards me, and here I am acting like a complete douchebag, and although I've never done something like this before the pushback, it's still indicative of the apathetic, frigid man that I used to act like last and this year to get my wife back in line. I didn't and won't apologize to her, because she'll just turn it into a reason to abuse me for the next several years (like she did from 2010-2012 when I apologized in 2009, only once, for using the computer too much), but this situation shouldn't even be here because it shouldn't have happened in the first place. So what happened?

There's no excuse for what I did today, but there is an explanation: I'm zoning out and running on autopilot, just as I have been since I got married. In fact, it's even worse now, because not only do I get the average of a single day off of work every month (and I zone through work days), but I also stopped smoking several months ago, which makes the zoning even worse. To be completely honest, every single day since somewhere around three months or so ago has been lived by the autopilot, unconscious me. I'm not exaggerating: the last time I actually, consciously looked at the number of days left to go before my marriage is through, rather than simply subtracting one from the previous day's number, was a season before.

My sight, my hearing, every sense is in almost complete darkness, and I only briefly wake up here and there in the day to play with my son or play a video game. The rest of it is handled by autopilot me, which is sometimes still set to Iceman. Switching between different personas isn't like a light switch; it's a gradual process of change that takes time to completely happen.

I need to work hard on being nicer to my wife now that she's beyond her abusive stage, and I need to do so while I remain in this dark pit that passes time through this marriage as fast as possible.