Three months ago, I wrote:
Love: love happens, and it happens in flavors like curry and paprika and wasabi and salt. It stings.
There you have it—my definition of love. I wrote something of the sweetness of love, too, but this part, this is what’s sticking to me, today, like moist sand.
It happened again. Could-be-love turned into tears and fogging up a bathroom mirror, telling the nice lady standing next to you that while her offer is appreciated and her wisdom undeniable—she is the older of you—you’ll be okay. Just gotta cry sometimes, ya’ know? Men. Same old. Like white bread with a smear of old butter, the kind that tastes like the way the refrigerator smells, but you eat it anyway because it feels good and smooth on your tongue, and maybe somewhere else inside that you can’t even see. Like telling yourself that today is the last day bread and butter will be your peace.
Today.
Tomorrow.
But today there’s something new, something that lingers in the middle of your forehead like somebody’s playing tug-of-war and your brain’s the prize. It lingers there, pushing you, taunting you, even though your best friend, and the waiter who served you your quesadilla with extra guacamole, and your ex who still has feelings for you but whose touch tells you, “friend,” even though each of them says: “Honey, this is not your fault.”
: “Honey, this is a reflection of his immaturity.”
: “…his fear of commitment.”
: “…his emotional instability.”
Even so, there’s the war:
I didn’t drive him to it. Did I drive him to it?
I didn’t drive him away. It was all me.
But I did pick him (he chose) focused my attentions on him, laser-sharp. He wouldn’t let me go. I should have known that circular affections (mine) could never fit into square intentions (his), and that sometimes black and white mixed makes the sharpest image you’ll ever see. What I mean to say is, I knew it couldn’t work. But did he?
What I do is that know that when he was here, he was everything, and I became like what happens in that first junior high science experiment, but it goes wrong. Liquid—shiny, hot—spilling over the top of the tubes and onto the floor, covering everything and all the people around me. And everybody’s watching and thinking, “Oh shit,” but they can’t stop it because it’s too late, and they wouldn’t know what to do anyway. But the thing is, it felt good to me, to them, too, sliding together like that. Like the way we were all supposed to be from the beginning. He made me liquid like that, from the first time.
And then—he left, and without even a word, whispered, “You’re not anything,” and I still thought, Maybe he’ll come around.
Yet here I am, standing next to a lady whose name I’ll never know, fogging up a mirror about it, praying to a god who hasn’t heard from me in years about it, and, as hard as I stare, as hard as I rub my eyes, screaming already from the angry swirl of my palm, as often as I tell myself that maybe if I just wait, just wait, just wait…it doesn’t look like anybody’s storming through that door to grab me and say, “I’m sorry. It was a mistake,” any time soon.