Why we come to coffee shops on Saturday mornings is beyond
me. We both hate it. I keep looking for an outlet on this brick wall I say. Is
that supposed to be a metaphor? you say, because we have been fighting. This is
me gaining my composure I say, and paste a lipstick smile on my face. I flash
the paper I am reading flat across my lap in a loud wrinkle. You are like that
woman who got breast implants that exploded from her chest as the air pressure
in the plane compartment changed. No, you’re not even the woman. You’re the
implants. Changing and breaking things. you say, although the arid tone of your
voice has a little more water in it. Wasn’t the pressure changing because the
plane was going down? Wouldn’t she have died anyway? I ask in mock sincerity. You
answer by jamming a toothpick into your teeth pointedly because you know it
makes me feel like my fingernails are being peeled back. You are like the small
men in my dreams who lived underground under that tree and who mined for rocks.
They were neither good nor evil, but they were ignorant as fuck. I say this,
even though it is not my normal tone. I am trying on new things, making new
faces in the mirror. You make a sound like a car backfiring and say: that was
Fraggle Rock. God, not even your dreams are original. (I am not crestfallen
because I am remembering the fight we had years ago in which I said or you
said, in response to a real complaint, a line from a song that was playing. The
line had just been sung. The fight limped on after that, because how can you
fight for real when you are laughing?) Is this original? I say and throw my
coffee in your face. You unflinchingly reply: The motion is not, though it’s
usually a martini or something classier than coffee from a coffee chain. Why do
you like this place? I answer by coughing without covering my mouth, which you
hate because you think I am like a rat carrying the bubonic plague, and because
you think the saliva from my cough carries germs that the saliva from my kisses
doesn’t carry, and because you blame me for every cold you have ever had. Wet
t-shirt contest you say, even though this is not your style at all, (now we are
just posturing) and throw the cream from the metal container marked “The Cream”
down the front of my dress. This is a dress I say, disgusted with your lack of
attention to detail, and continue:
you are like that preacher who embezzled sex from all those prostitutes. I
don’t say “homophobic” or “male prostitutes” because the situation is way more
complex than that. You mean he didn’t pay them? You ask, stunned by the lack of
protestant respect for work ethic. Yep. Big scandal. Big sandal you say, and
slap my soggy backside with the bottom of your flip flop. That is a flip flop I
say, rolling my eyes until the sides of them hurt. Then we go home and paint
the entire outside of the house a different color than it had been, but only by
two shades because we laugh behind our blinds at the thought of our neighbors
trying to figure out if the color has changed, or if they had just never really
looked at it. We imagine their
conversations with each other full of pleasantries and ellipses. We show up
at the block party dressed as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love even though you are
taller and broader and better looking and I am a brunette and not even close to
drug-skinny, and even though it is not a costume party. It is an excuse to wear
flannel and combat boots and plastic heels and a nightgown as a dress. We are
ageless in our mirth. It goes without saying that the love we make has never
been made before. The scale of our pleasure has never been imagined, it is
wider in its range than the human ear can hear, and more exact than the tiny
particles in the paint of a pointillist painter’s depiction of a point. This is
how we burn to ash, in the gaze that never breaks, no matter how much the
earth’s horizon curves in the distance between us. I half believe the earth is
flat because I can feel your eyes even now.
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