How I Say I Love You These Days

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.

This Is How It Will Be (a love story)

                                  

Other people had already set the table, so we wandered out to see about the yard. There was a plot of dandelions that had puffed out their seeds. The day was still, so we began blowing on them and flapping our arms to create wind until we were dizzy. A man who had been standing like a tree, said, the dandelion blowers are over there and motioned to a field of kids, tall as corn, somberly blowing the fluff to the ground. He shook his head. Maybe you can do something about it, I am busy pretending to be this tree here, so when the rest of the world peers in from their living rooms, they won’t know we’ve killed off all the bees. He snarled his barkpocked face in a knob and said, child labor. It’s disgusting. No one said anything about wishes.

I couldn’t remember the beginning of things. Adrift, bereft, you repeated, fingering the place on your rumpled coat where a button had been. It was you said, made from the wooden teeth of George Washington. Carver? I said. I don’t know who carved it you said. I tried to remember who GW was, if it wasn’t Carver, and could only think of the white heads of dead flowers in the hands of children.

Where are we going I wanted to say, but the question came out like this: Going where we are, and the question mark caught in the space between my teeth, so we walked until we got back to where it all began.

What if our names aren’t on the list? You ask, nervous and itchy. I scrape my nails against your back to plot our location. Ah, right there, you say, (you are wrong, we are over here I say and move my finger lightly over your kidney) but really, what if our names are not on the list? We burned off our fingerprints long ago. No, they melted I say, long enough ago to be our grandfather clock. In the blizzard of 15? you ask, shaking off the rain. No, remember? in the fires of 20, I say. Our faces melt in the acid falling from the sky, but we are bone-close and I love the smile of your skeleton.

We click into the house finally, our soggy bones sticking from the humidity. Dinner is still being made. The children are drunk on dandelion wine (what did you think was going to happen, making them work all those hours and with only one song playing over and over again, the national fucking anthem says a youngish woman to an oldish man. They have no hope she says, propping a sloppy 7 year old up against a rubber plant which he wraps his arms around and says he loves). Can we help? We ask, opening and closing our fleshless hands to stretch our tendons.  (will we scare the children? we say to each other, and then chatter our teeth in a thousand rough guffaws. They have seen worse you say, tenderly touching my cheekbone).

I wear the phalanx of your smallest finger around my neckless spine. You have carved my new name into your rib right above your missing rib.

Now that we don’t have flesh, it is like the garden of Eden again. We are shameless and thin, and we can talk to animals through the teeth marks they leave on our femurs and clavicles. Also, you point out one day while we are sneaking into abandoned malls and trying on clothes like hangers, we can travel anywhere, and no one will know we are from where we are from. Where we are from slips through your teeth like oil.

The word feels like a coin with so much dirt stuck to it that it jams up the machine, when all you wanted was a rubber ball to bounce or stuffed animal to smooth, or a plastic gem-stoned ring to wear: something to pass the time, something to help you remember where you’ve been.

Where we have been we remember in shivers at night, while we rename the revised constellations. Orion has lost most of his belt, and the Pleiades are down to only five sisters. Little bear is gone, and Ursa’s low growl has become a bed for our bones, which are grinding down faster now that the oxygen is gone. The only thing that makes us sad is that the dandelion children never got to grow up. As for us, we lie in pile of tangled parts, and, when we are a pile of dust, we say excitedly as we fall asleep, we will REALLY be able to travel. Even beyond this world I say. And you nod in a sort of shimmering of particles against slants of light from the shadowy moon, whose long work is almost done.