inertia

At night we’d hang out at the park behind his house, drinking beers and tossing rocks at the fencing of the tennis court until we got bored and went home and had sex. He told me every other month he wasn’t sure if he still loved me. Still, he stayed. He lacked the inertia to leave, or maybe he still loved me—I was never sure which one was real.

He broke things off with me after a year of living together. I didn’t do dishes and he hated doing laundry for two people. Things get rocky when you weave your lives together. He wanted to spend his evenings alone or on dates with other men and I wanted to spend mine reading long posts online about drama happening to people other than me. It was never going to work.

Love, whatever it is, seemed pointless to me. I was more interested in stability. You could fall in love with anyone if they were willing to cook two to three times a week. He believed love was all spark and sex. If, on a Wednesday night, the only thing the two of you could think to do together was watch an old episode of Survivor, well then game over.

At times I think I disagreed, but nobody had ever loved me past that Wednesday, so I had to conclude he was right.

Once, late at night and covered in sweat after a show, I ran into him. We walked to the park and took turns tossing rocks and taking swigs of vodka from his flask. He politely inquired about my life and invited me back to his place for the night. We hooked up and I wrote bad poetry about it for a month before growing out my hair and moving to West Texas where the sky and earth were flat and nothing ever seemed to change.