If you’re really mad at the person you sleep with, like so mad that you
think you can’t even bear to sleep with that person or maybe just so
mad that you want to Send Them A Message by not sleeping with them,
it’s probably a good idea to alert that person to the level of your
anger sometime before you go to sleep on the couch.

Otherwise the next day you find yourself with a crick in your neck,
explaining to the person who totally missed the whole thing that they
slept alone because you were an angry angry little red hen, finding
your grain of anger and growing it up and baking a loaf of resentment
and ruffled feathers while the other person slept peacefully away, and
at some point in your angry narrative you will realize which one of you
was ridiculous.

Then one of you will have a good cry and both of you will have a good
laugh and you will be very glad that the couch is as comfortable as it
is because otherwise you would be up more than a crick without a paddle
of reason, and that night you will sleep together like sensible people;
I mean all things considered it’s not a bad way to spend a fight, but
wouldn’t it have been better if… no, actually, this is a happy story
all around. Another anecdote, an annecdote, the antidote to the sadness
you would carry around if you didn’t have the sense to shake it out,
hold it away from you, realize that it’s a color that has never suited
you anyway, no matter how flattering the cut.

Anger breathes on me until sometimes all I feel is the heat of it on me; all of me not just my neck. All day today I have eaten spoonfuls of vinegar and salt on rice, on bread, on anything that would hold them until finally I was just pouring it into tablespoons and swallowing it whole. It is better than tears and pours easily. Still the breath of resentment is powerful and all my natural bitterness and dirt can hardly hold it back. I can only produce so much on my own. Hence the reinforcement tablespoons of today's premium aceto di vino it says. I am not well-equipped to do battle with this form of suffocation and know these tools are lacking but know no others. Certainly my sugar resolves were never up to snuff, I cannot fight this ill-will with anything heartwarming. For example let me tell you a story about a girl who went for a walk in a pretty summer dress inevitably winds up with her grubby at the well with her dress torn and hair arrack because she wanted to look at spiders and found a pile of dirty magazines instead; that and more than that. Arrack is sweet Indian booze; you learn a lot playing Scrabble is one thing I learned playing Scrabble. Surprisingly it is not the summer heat this time and in fact on the second tablespoon which I did or did not feel burn in my stomach I thought maybe I don't so much feel bad as I make myself feel bad but you know: what's bad, anyway. Coming down from a mountain however lovely the view however snowcapped the peaks however pure your intentions, however all that height does not lower the sea level of the actual ground and in time you learn that you could never have handled that lovely high thin pure etcetera air for very long as you well know, deep breather. Drinker of vinegar and salt. You were meant to live at sea level always.

One problem with thinking about doing something is that even if later
you decide that you’re not going to do it, even if later you decide it
would be a bad thing or even a Very Bad thing, even if you’re totally
convinced that you ought not do that thing, the problem is: you already
thought about it. You put it on the table at some point and there it is
on the table forever and always and even if some part of your brain
knows it’s total poison that part of your brain has to constantly be
informing your hands that just because it’s on the table doesn’t make
it potato chips and you cannot either eat just one so just don’t even
start. Don’t even. But you put it on the table once. But it’s still a
really bad idea. No, really it is.

I was nice to him because he was with you, liked him because you liked him. When you broke up I lost you both.
***
While you were feeding quarters to the jukebox so you could dance with
her like you used to, she asked if she could sleep at my place, just
for a week or so.
***
Watching him wave and make monkey faces as the train pulled away, and
then listening for two hours about how handsome he was, how much you
loved him. Eating a sandwich and listening, listening, listening.
***
When you went to get the drinks, he said I was a witch for what I did to him. He said when he touched your hair he pretended it was mine.
***
I was talking about how much I hate your wife, the things you say she does to you. When I looked up your daughter was sitting across from me.
***
When you left the room. The things I heard. The things I learned. I am tired of being another woman.

hey remember that time when I left flowers on his doorstep
hey remember that time when I skipped over every crack
hey remember that time when I only slept 3 hours a day
hey remember that time when

No,
nobody remembers that time, so I can reframe it any way I want. It’s
not like "no witnesses" was my policy; more like my default position. I
mean, here’s the thing: if you start re-inventing yourself at age 12
and manage to do it consistently every 5 years or so, by the time
you’re 40 it’s like nothing matters anymore because nobody remembers
anything. It’s like reverse vampires: you grow old and everybody else
is young and you have more and more memories and more wrinkles to match
and everybody around you is young and idealistic and you feel like you
except nobody knows the stories. Remember how you linked arms and sang
Gilligan’s Island to drown out stupidity. Hey remember that time when
they almost got off the island. Nobody remembers that anymore. Nobody
remembers that you once wrote letters, nobody remembers what postage
stamps look like, nobody remembers how you put your scent on the paper,
as a clue.

And nobody remembers who you were except every few years one of
them writes to apologize for not treating you better when they were
only treating you how you deserved, oh misery are you so sad tonight.
Nobody remembers but they remember bad, by which I don’t mean badly;
remember how it felt when you thought things mattered, oh those were
the days. My friend.

Remember when you liked people without wondering if you’d miss them when they died. Remember when you met people for a minute. Remember when
watching shit unfold was mysterious, when you couldn’t see where the
story was going before it started. Remember when you thought it would
go on forever.

I see someone I thought I knew (however vaguely — still: thought I knew) doing something so entirely counter to what I would do in those circumstances that though what I want is to know if I don’t understand the circumstances, though what I want is to know how that could be the decision, though what I want is ever and always to be informed, to understand, to know better, I am afraid that this difference in approach is a drastic difference in morals, and that knowing that would mean I never knew them, however vaguely. And so I bite my tongue and watch and wait and later maybe when nobody’s looking I’m not there anymore because I probably was never really there to begin with, since it wasn’t where I thought it was, anyway.

It’s interesting how the focus has been on him for so long. How he came
to you, how he won you, how he was changed by you, how he felt when you left. Not
left: abandoned. I’m quoting. You kissed him awake and he listened to
you leave. And that’s all that gets talked about, and while that’s
certainly a good story, a classic, one for the poets, it’s not entirely
fair, is it.

Like take how they never talk about how he came to you; it’s like
he just was suddenly there. Like he arrived from nowhere. Like it’s not
possible that you wanted him to come to you, called him: none of it was
your idea. This ties in to the "conquering" idea which has always vexed
you; that and the "winning" — you are not some prize, dammit.

And it’s always like he arrived with nothing but his pain and his
past with which to barter. You had your own pain, a point nobody likes
to consider. The truth is: you both had things that you needed so badly
you’d decided you’d never get them. You both were well-covered in
tarnish to hide the imperfections: his dented pride, your gouged heart.
And because you both knew the truth about yourselves, it was easy to
see the truth about each other. They make like you healed him and you
like to think that’s true but you didn’t walk away empty-handed by a
long shot. Spit and cloth and ashes from letters you burned long ago,
and he handed your heart back to you; not repaired because it can’t be
fixed, but no longer something you had to close your fist around to
hide.

Or they talk about him hearing you go. One presumes
there were stairs to be descended. He listened to the music of your
footsteps as you left. Well: what was he supposed to do? He’s not
stupid after all, and sobbing after you is the one thing that would
have sent you off sooner. Without wishing to discount how hard it might
have been to stand there, clenching a jaw muscle or two, being stoic,
it is a lot harder to go downstairs knowing you’re doing the right
thing but also still having your eyes full of tears. And you couldn’t
look back because then he would have seen you cry; it cuts both ways
and it’s not like it was easy.

It’s hard to let go completely, and probably you never will: It feels
like letting go would mean denying it meant anything, and it did, it
did, it did. The goal is to be honest about it, not encapsulate it in a
caricature, and yet button it down somewhere so it doesn’t look at
you all the time with its what if? eyes. What if you had stayed? What
if staying had been what was meant to be, instead of leaving?

We talk about the past like we knew where it was headed just because
we know where it ended. We say something wasn’t meant to be, because
that’s how it isn’t, now. If you had stayed with him, he would not have
stayed in love with you. He was prepared for you to leave because
whatever he said, he wanted you to go. Anyway, that’s what you tell
yourself.

I am (nearly) forty years old and I still rarely make eggs without
getting a teeny bit of shell in there somewhere. My friend says cooking,
for her, is like editing for me: a compulsion. And here I am leaving
grocer’s apostrophes of eggshell all over. Hopeless. This morning for
breakfast I had zucchini and eggs and potatoes; the crisp edges of
properly fried zucchini mask the eggshell, though I think miraculously
this morning I made an omelet without breaking any more egg than was
absolutely necessary. I was
singing while I stirred in the potato: "Any weird you can cook, I can
eat weirder, I can
eat any food weirder than you!" and I’m sure Ethyl Merman rolled over in her
grave, but maybe she was dancing along.

Yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I made rice. "A
scant cup. A scant cup. A cup that is scant. That cup’s scant. That cup
can’t." WHY. Some people talk all the time to prevent their brains from
starting that pesky business of thinking but it’s like I’m treading
water in my brain sometimes to stop myself from floating.

Since I don’t walk Squire to school anymore, I am no longer
terrorizing the neighborhood with my early morning outbursts, standing
in the middle of the sidewalk laughing because I remember something
outrageously funny or chatting myself up in my phony French accent. I’m
sure everybody’s much happier. Nobody needs to see my particular brand of crazy before eight a.m. On Mondays when I go to the high school,
the old ladies on the tram all love me ’cause I give them my seat when
the pig men don’t, and then they (the ladies) always want to talk to me,
with their gold teeth and purple tints and whack makeup. They know
they’ve spotted one of their own in the making. Last week one of them
was nodding at me the whole way home, in other words giving me much
more positive feedback than your average high school senior, and I
wanted to give her my cheery smile but frankly it was all too awful in
my head and I just couldn’t. When she got off the tram she patted my
hand and I realized I was crying. Oh, my old ladies, the mascara is
roping down my cheeks and I am closer than I think.

Last week was entirely too long. If the weekend hadn’t come when it
had, I think drastic action would have been taken. I have high hopes for
this week, though. Not least because the Teletubbie House of Pain video makes me
confident there must be some real good in the world.

subject line from "White Dwarfs", a perfect poem by Michael Ondaatje.

I must enjoin you stay on this course! Cleave fast; it is sanctioned.