Tuesday

Morning

In the morning, wrapped in blankets and the warm safety of each other you ask me to marry you and, sheepishly I agree. This is not a proposal, at least in the traditional sense, but instead a conviction or admission of feeling. This is a plan or the first tracings of one and given my type-A personality, I find romance and terror in its faint outlines.

You tell me how you know I don’t believe in marriage but how I still want to marry you regardless and I am reminded about the quality I love most about you: your ability to cut straight to the core of me, identifying my most sincerely held beliefs and laying them out bare and open.

I have been singing Acolyte out loud in the car, replacing she with he, like it’s some sort of revolution. “Annie, I want you to marry me/We’ll wait a few years/I don’t mean to frighten you/I just wanna be clear.”

Afternoon

In the afternoon you wander the streets waiting for your boyfriend to get off of work. You’ve got time to kill and you’re all on your own in some city you don’t know anything about. It feels good to be alone. Or, at least that’s what you tell yourself. Your world is changing all the time, but most importantly your heart keeps growing inside of you: pushing against the cage of your chest and causing you pain you don’t know how to handle.

You have been thinking about love, though it’s a silly thing to think about. You are newly in love and have years to go before you understand it fully—if you ever do. You are thinking about song birds and rivers that cut through the country. You are thinking about summer time and the differences in temperature between the northern and southern cities. You are thinking that you could do this forever: bare yourself to someone, expecting nothing in return.

You are thinking of killing yourself. Though you are always thinking about killing yourself those days. You are thinking about the smallness of your body, the tightness of your new muscle and stiffness of your old bone. You are thinking about the ways you are not happy, or the ways you wish for happiness. You are thinking of happiness as something that comes to you, drifting into your life before eventually drifting away, not as something you claim for yourself.

Night

In the night you sit outside and sip your drinks, soaking up the quickly fading spring. You are not much of a drinker and I drink too fast, leaving me tipsy after two beers. There is nothing novel to what we are doing. There is everything novel about what we are doing.

During therapy my therapist recounts to me my transitions and changes. “What a joy,” he says “to think of you in the past, a lonely sad kid in the pool and to see you now.”

You want a dirty gin martini because you had a good one in Colorado and I want a hazy IPA even though they sort of taste bad. We don’t eat, just snack, because we ate lunch too late. There is nothing profound here. There is everything profound here.

I have been listening to Intersection, “I know your every secret/I know your every sound/But here I stare on from the fence/This old hungry bloodhound/Pretending in unending joy/To hate to be alone/To adore the great unknown/When all I know is you
/And all you are is home” like it’s some prophetic vision.