November 5 - Divine intervention

You are my pleasure, you are my pain. Was it divine intervention that brought me to you, or the devil’s curse? I came home that night, drunk off of wine. Everything feels better after three glasses of wine. I was operating by rote, robotic, not conscious, when I locked the door with my left hand, applied the dead bolt with my right, while the left was already reaching up to perform the second motion of switching on both light switches: the top for the living room, the bottom for the kitchen. This is what I called them anyway, since it was really a studio and all the rooms were one room, but I had bought furniture that imposed these human, inconsequential divides upon the space.

When I come home, you are already passed out on the bed, and I want to ignore you with every tendon and axon and neuron in my body. But just as I flip on the lights, you let out a cough that is more of a wheeze, and it makes my heart catch and I find myself looking down on you tenderly instead of batting you upside the head. So instead I kneel to unlace your shoes – which you have forgotten to take off – unlace them and set them neatly in the corner, like two sentries standing guard for the night. I have brought you pizza in a box, two slices of cheese, which are just out of the oven, bubbling under the cardboard, only because you have requested it.

“I’m hungry,” you said over the phone. Followed by a confused, “Wait, where are you?” You got home before me and it took you several sentences to realize I wasn’t there.

“I’m having a glass of wine at the French café. I’ll be home soon,” I promise.

“I’m hungry,” you repeat.

‘I’ll being you pizza,” I promise. “I’m a block from the pizza place.”

In fact, I am not. I am a good ten minute walk from the pizza place, but I will do anything to increase your happiness. I have forgotten my umbrella, so I walk through the slanting rain that dusts down on my hair, and fetch you two slices of cheese, and shield the box with my body on the walk home so the slices do not become soggy; my body can bear the brunt.

I feel as though I should be black and blue all over, and am surprised to find, when I look in the mirror, that my flesh it still flesh-colored, that my eyes are still green, that my hair is still a matted, blondish-brown (although darker for the rain). I always hated that term, as a child. Blondish-brown. The in between-ness of it, the neither blonde nor brown, the you are a mutt, a mongrel, a hyphen. No one notices hyphens.

Nothing holds my attention like it used to. This is how you’ve ruined me, I think with a pout, as I look over at you sleepy soundly and I try to find something I can do in the studio that won’t wake you. But nothing holds my attention like it used to. Not the newspaper, which I can barely skim. Not the book I am reading, whose words might as well be written in a foreign language, for all the sense that they make. Even computer solitaire feels stale while you slumber on my bed, your snoring louder than my brain. In this moment, I think: I hate you I hate you I hate you and I know that it is the truth. You cough again and my heart catches for the second time in a span of two hours, and I rush over with a glass of water that you don’t notice because you are asleep.

The bigger fool am I.

I feel like my face is leaking. Oh no; those are my tears. Good, my skin is not yet melting off like wax. I play with a candle flame for a while.

I slice off a chunk of cheddar cheese not because I am hungry but because my teeth want to gnaw. The serrated knife finds the tip of my thumb, so discreetly that for a moment I’m not sure what I felt had been real.

“Did it get me?” I ask. The bead of red blood tells me yes, the knife got me. I have band-aids in the bathroom, but the wound isn’t deep and I’m not concerned, so for the moment, I just suck up the red in between bites of cheddar cheese. It will be my dose of nutritional iron for the day, I decide. Only once I wipe my hands of the last crumbs do I go fishing underneath the bathroom sink.

By the time I remove the band-aid an hour later (sticky and dissolved because I have done dishes in the interim) the sides of the wound have knit together like two chapped lips puckered for a kiss.

How fast flesh wounds heal, I muse. Would I could say the same for those of the soul. I hate fighting with you, but we have fought, and so tonight while you sleep soundly I simmer inside like a soup set over a low burner on the stove and then forgotten. By the time you remember it, hours later, the edges of the pan are brown, crusted. I’m surprised to note that my fingertip wound has knitted up cleanly, that it does not have this brown, crumbly puss burping out from it.

My mother always said: never go to bed angry.

My father always said: everything will feel better in the morning. I want to wake you up and ask you which you would prefer, but you look so angelic when you sleep that I go back to deliberating with my reflection in the mirror. “Mom’s advice, or Dad’s?” I ask. My reflection purses her lips. I wonder if I look as drunk as my mirrored self, then laugh with relief. Nobody looks that drunk.

I go to bed not because I am tired but because I have absolutely nothing else to do.

By morning your arm is around me; it is your tacit way of saying you have forgiven me, and therefore I have forgiven you, and I do not protest as I curl into your body with a contented sigh.

“So we’re okay then?” you ask sleepily, happily, and I purr out agreement. There is contentment in the early morning sunlight that falls on the sheets.

“Do you believe in divine intervention?” I ask suddenly, raising my head from your chest.

“What?” you say absently, not understand why I have asked this. But then, neither do I.

“Nothing,” I say, settling back into the crook of your arm.