Sentenced to Endure

He is by nature a recluse. An 
internal fury rots his soul. The
sociopath in him spurns human
contact. In an earlier era he would
have lived his life as a hermit as
far from human habitation as his
own penchant for reducing life
to the simplicity of no contact
with others reliant only on his
capacity to endure his very own
wretchedness in existence seen
by himself as a virtue and by others
as an unfortunate pathology as
close to unadulterated misanthropy
as conceivable. Which is just how
very strange it is that he was
somehow induced to marry a
woman whose bright outlook on
life must surely over the decades
have dimmed in the corrosion of
intimacy with this man. She still
smiles but has abandoned all
pretense that life is a journey of
great promise. It has become for
her as it was for him a struggle to
endure the negatively unendurable.