Love is the Weight of Water

It’s ten p.m. and the phone has inexplicably flown halfway across the room then slid the rest of the way on it’s smooth silver back with the kind of skittering, scratching sound that lets you know that was not a good thing to do to your own damn phone. I could have my shit packed and be out of here by the time he gets home. Fuck this! I’ll say it again, Fuck this! And even though I’m completely alone, I throw up double middle fingers just to make my point. I thunder across the house with a bad ass swagger and am seeing myself on a motorcycle alone like James Dean or something, or maybe in the center of a room with adoring would be suitors begging me to tell another like Diana Ross, laughing the kind of laugh only people in movies can muster and he will be out in the cold rain staring, while I am far too busy to notice. Where will I go? I’ll move back with my folks or in with a friend, a roommate would be nice or shit I could go it alone I mean I can do bad all by myself. Then he will hafta get back with his ex, let’s see how he likes that! No, I’ll just stay here her can leave. And I am now cleaning like I’m on Meth.

Then the phone rings and I know it’s him and I don’t want to answer, but I do. He releases an awkward hello, it’s quiet and urgent like a baby about to cry. I tell myself that was more for him than me. What he says next doesn’t register nearly as much as it’s softness like when you ask someone if they are okay, expecting forced affirmation, and receive a no. I fully intend to be curt and civil and quick enough to get back to the business of scrubbing through more dust and tile than my own ego and hurt feelings. I roll my eyes and offer audible disinterest at being detained from the pity party I’ve thrown in my honor. I am taken aback by the hurricane of blame and regret that I unleash and push past the little clicks that tell me I could not be that angry about a phone call I didn’t receive and burdens he didn’t help carry, the clicks that say this is about your father, your best friend that burned you, your own insecurity. I push past and arm myself with arrows of petty ‘the principle of the thing’s and I place the blame of every unhappiness I have squarely on his shoulders.

He releases a sound tired and too proud to be given words like the wince and rushed intake of air my grandmother makes when her arthritic joints pain her unceasing fingers. Now I sway in waves of reason numbered you too are selfish, aren’t we all, do you need to throw him away for being flawed and wouldn’t it be fair to ask for what you need or hell even demand it rather than attaching so much meaning to symbols and gestures so much so that he is an ambassador in your arms and must always gravely observe the social customs and remember that he is representing everyone you have ever loved and everyone who’s cut you. I am knocked back by a wave of I should have told you this when it was a chilly wind in need of a jacket before it became a hurricane with no solution. Before I can let out the apology lumped on my throat he reminds me that all things truly miraculously beautiful are intensely painful they are breaking like birth and you will be driven to giving up and find it nearly impossible so you go on and you forget and enjoy the light and the calm until the contractions begin again. Only iron sharpens iron and if we are to cut through then we must endure when the sparks are flying. And I realize that love is the weight of water, crushing and freeing and uplifting I must let go and float for there is nothing more you can do with an ocean, it will be whether you want it to or not.