I was not what anyone would ever consider to be scholarly, but I knew a thing or two, such as change is a relentless tide, washing away the familiar and revealing the unexpected. I simply never imagined the waves of change would carry my husband so far from the shore of normalcy.

I watched him. Discreetly at first, then openly, brazenly, obsessively. My eyeballs suctioned to his morphing form like a suckerfish on the belly of a whale. How easily he accepted the change, diving into the churning tumult of transformation without a backward glance.

In the beginning, there was stumbling, which took me back to our first dance, with his clumsy steps on my toes, and the laughter that followed. He became graceful over the years but now the elegance of bipedal motion had been exchanged for the fumbling uncertainty of an infant giraffe taking its first steps. Depth perception skewed by that unblinking third eye erupting from his forehead like a fleshy periscope. But adapt he did, with preternatural swiftness. Grace and poise oozed from his pores as that ocular oddity swiveled this way and that, drinking in sights beyond the curtain of the mundane.

“Can you see into other dimensions with that thing?” I asked him one evening.

His chuckle was dry leaves skittering across pavement. “If only you knew the wonders it reveals.”

As he devoured books at a ravenous pace—pulp fiction, classics, appliance manuals, shampoo ingredients—I tossed and turned through fathoms of insomnia, the whisper of relentlessly turning pages a sinister lullaby. In the morning, bleary-eyed, I stumbled upon his latest conquest: an entire dictionary, ingested and excreted before the coffee had finished percolating.

Then came the nose, nostrils flaring, twitching, morphing into cavernous tunnels to funnel in a universe of scent. He practically pressed it against the pages, inhaling knowledge, breathing out bewilderment.

“You’re not developing a cocaine habit, are you dear?” My laugh was thin and brittle. His answering glare sharp as a scalpel.

He burrowed into solitude then, a hermit crab retreating into its shell. I was left on the outside, peering in through tiny drilled holes, furtive keyholes. Brief glimpses of ears elongating to elfin points, gums weeping blood as a second set of teeth sprouted like a garden of enamel, tongue unfurling and splitting in two like a serpent’s.

As I watched his form morph and shift, I couldn’t help but wonder if change was an evolution or an erosion of the soul.

“What’s happening to you?” I whispered through the barrier of the door.

“Glorious things,” came the sibilant reply, barely recognizable. His eyes, now all three of them, glowed with an unearthly light, reflecting a universe of knowledge and wonder that was both terrifying and fascinating. “I am becoming something more, something beyond the limits of human understanding.”

Then silence, dense and impenetrable as a black hole, sucking in sound, light, sanity. We used to spend hours debating philosophy, our voices rising and falling in passionate discourse. Now, his words were few and far between, replaced by cryptic smiles and eerie silences.

I gibbered and clawed but to no avail. Love, loyalty, curiosity—all consumed by the void of his absence. With each new alteration, I felt a piece of our shared life slip away, replaced by an increasing sense of dread. The man I loved was becoming a stranger, and my heart ached with the loss of every familiar trait. Staying meant losing myself in his endless transformations, becoming a mere shadow of my former self. I needed to reclaim my own identity, to find a space where I could breathe and rediscover who I was.

Trembling, I stuffed a rucksack with the remnants of my former life and jumped into the car. As I sped into the night, I refused to meet my own eyes in the rearview mirror, haunted by the memory of his unblinking third eye and fearful of what I might see in my reflection.

The open road ahead promised freedom, but it also served as a stark reminder of everything I had lost. In that moment, I understood that leaving my husband wasn’t an escape but an acknowledgment of the relentless tide of change that had swept us apart. The surge of relief was tainted by grief, a bittersweet recognition that I was drifting away from the man to whom I had vowed my heart and my days.

As the miles stretched out before me, I came to accept that change is the ultimate force of nature, indifferent to our desires, vows, and fears. It reshaped us in ways we could not foresee, pushing us to evolve or be left behind. I realized that if my husband’s transformation was his way of embracing change, then by running away, I risked becoming extinct.