The love we put away

And at the day’s end that is all she could do. Make a pronouncement, a post-mortem of me, and then on to the housing board, or to Jaycees. When I see her, and listen to her, what she is actually saying is, I really have no time for this. Easier to bleed.

So I turn to myself. Put the blame on me. That’s the only way. Or there’s no going back to her for more.

But sometimes she speaks to me. But when she does, I can’t see her talking to me. It’s like she’s always addressing the person standing next to me, or the object before me. Even when we are near, and especially when she is right in front of me, she draws back, peers at me. As much as I can I try not to observe her, because no matter how close she stands she has a way of putting herself away, like she is at the other side of the road at mid-day and I among a crowd milling at the other bank. I don’t even remember us conversing. Just once maybe. In the house of a friend. I went to her side and she turned to me to say something, about a book or a line in a book and I felt like one of the male servants getting instruction on some very specific information about the size of the nail to buy from which hardware store at this side of the street.

But yesterday she talked to me and said something nice about her country. She’s not one who really likes any particular place on earth, not even her place in Az. I sometimes think she chose that state because that sums her life up. So I would ask her, sitting among her poet-friends with estranged husbands in other continents, why did you choose to live in a desert? And she would tell me, not even raising her head to look who asked, just stop drumming her fingers on the table and sit back a little, her eyes on the garden behind us: “It’s not a desert, just a warm place.”

“But it is a desert! Cactuses and sand all over!” I would insist. She would turn towards me a little and smile a little. “In winter it’s gorgeous.” She wouldn’t trust you to be kidding with her. She would not even so much as acknowledge that you said a joke or something to hurt her. She is just too good for any of that.

She said to me yesterday that what happened to me would not have happened if I were in her country. In the US of A nobody can get away with beating a woman, she said. I felt lost. Toppled.

But she and her friends, they really understand each other. Like that time I told her about the visit I made to her poet-friend, who said to me she never thought she would come to this,  her life taken care by others, now she’s fed like a dog, taken to the vet like a dog. She cut me. Said I’ve got no gifts except malice. So I said this is getting me nowhere. It ought to stop here.

So now here I am, back to what they call one’s elemental self. I wouldn’t say I am better for this. The truth is, I feel barren, empty. And when I see my friends, tagging along their girlfriends, some making up stories about the loves they found and cannot quite get enough of, I get sick. I feel sick. I cannot stand love.

I prefer losses, really. Each time I feel clean. Lapped clean. Like a knife just done in the smithy. And once I got to that elemental feeling, I can’t even recall the love that I once felt, can’t remember the look the touch the lines she wrote for me. When you get to that, you won’t even ask anymore what it is that you have done, or what went wrong, or who turned away first. Somehow none of that matters anymore, only the knowledge, and the certainty, that it’s over.