2 for Tuesday

In your bed

I watched the glass prism dangling from your window, imagining my life refracted into its multi-colored lights. In each of them, I was something different to you: a partner, a lover, a colleague, a friend. With each color bent, the frequency of our love changed, the wavelength of our history vibrating in new yet predictable patterns. In some, we met the same way: in college through an act of random circumstance or boredom turned material. In others, I knew you from childhood, building a friendship off the private secrets we both shared. Others seemed familiar and long-lasting as if our relationship had stretched far away from here; a mix of colors extended into a disappearing horizon.

Yet, despite their different forms, none seemed to stick. Each one ended just the same: my parallel selves alone, wondering if you missed me the way I missed you.

It was mid-afternoon but I had nowhere to go. You wouldn’t come home for hours, despite it being a holiday. You liked to work, finding comfort in the tedium of chasing down tasks and solving inter-office drama. I had no job but still plenty of money. I swept your floors, carefully removing every trace of cat hair left wedged into their grooves. I dusted and cleaned your tables, eliminating the thick lines of dust compiled in the hard-to-reach areas you never checked. I made your bed and folded your laundry. I cleaned the dishes I used and set them delicately to dry on your countertop. Then, I left before you could return. I booked a flight to Chicago, to bundle myself up in the cool comfort of a dark and endless winter, free from our prismatic love.

Posing for cars

Alice told me that hearts are breaking all the time, “there’s nothing novel about it.” I suspected she was right. After all, people kept writing novels.

At night, before the sun had fully set and the splintered pattern of light and black bathed the body, I thought a lot about ending things. But, he was a good cook and told me he loved me when things went wrong.

Often, I thought about the mountains. Moving somewhere up north where their sinister faces could linger over me, spying on my slow unraveling.

I cheated once. I don’t recommend it. It’s messy business, leaves you scattered and sort of crazed. It’s not the action. The action is quick. But then there are endless others. Action, reaction, and all that. There’s the accounting of things, the drama, the ending or the decision to stay. Either choice is terrible. One, you fix things and still this ugly side of you looms over everything. Sure, you weren’t lying but then again, who could really be certain? Two, you end things and then get together with the other person. Things are steady for a while but then that other person starts wondering if you’d do the same thing to them. And you would, of course you would. You can’t lie so you sort of fib. Let truths unspool naturally. Something like that.

But that light. That strange and patterned light. It could hypnotize you if you’re not ready for it. Makes everything dramatic. Folding laundry becomes a movie. You become an actor looking for motivation.

I read something once, from someone with no acclaim—a friend of a friend really—how cheating wasn’t so bad. Instead, it was the refractions, the slow and shaky way it rippled through all things. “We like to think of time,” he wrote. “As this static unchanging thing. But it’s a force, a dimension maybe, it flows some way: forward or backward, maybe circular. It’s around us is the thing. So when he cheated it was this moment but it was also all the other moments past and future. It was the stolen glances and the quiet texts all reshaped in the wake of it. It was the endless wondering, not ‘did he love me?’ But how much and why and when did it stop?”

Reading that shook something in me. I let out a scream and then a cry the first time, but held it together afterwards. It was silly really. A physical thing. A metaphor. I wasn’t unhappy, far from it. I was safe and in love and the depth of that clawed at me, pulling my muscles and tearing at my bone. I had always loved him.

He was naive to think otherwise.