Leaving
By Morgan Kohler
You say you wish you could bottle this, make the memory something you might slip into when we’re apart. But it wouldn’t be real—your brain would add in wanted parts, desired pieces. You say you don’t want to go, even though we both have to pull ourselves together, get dressed and go to work, we’re already late. Before we open the door to the world outside, I pull your hand into mine; my lips tend to seek out your ring finger, the one on your left hand, even though I no longer believe in marriage (habit, evolution, desire—who’s to say).
We both know your being here is wrong—I made a promise to someone who is not you. (It’s not that I regret the decision, but mustn’t we make allowances for the given fact that people will change?) The other day I told you I had thought of tearing everything apart. You knew what I meant. My anger astonished me when all you could muster was, “That’s a lot to think about.” I’ve never been good with empathy, of course, always considering last what’s being experienced elsewhere, that my utterance might’ve planted a hope in you regarding a choice where you had no say, and which I barely believed was a choice at all. (Something so pedestrian as leaving one man for another—the new cage wouldn’t be any more free.) I wish it were enough for either of us to simply take up time, to buy it down, little by little, but lately you’ve been asking, “Is your life better when I’m around?”
After you leave, I scorch you from my body under shower spray, and rip follicle from dermis with wax as if you were embedded that deep. Yet I would tattoo the lines of you on my mottled skin, thick and unapologetic, there among the proverbial and physical scars that already exist (you can’t leave your past behind, and there’s no use trying to forget either).
I haul the sheets from the bed, stained as they are now (sweat and semen in hard wrinkles), stained as they will be forever (when we couldn’t wait for my bleeding to completely stop), and pull the cases off the pillows (though not before I push my face into yours and breathe), and stuff everything in an appliance, too small for such a load, that hammers from side to side with the effort of washing away our remains (irreverent ghosts of the heartbeats so recently entwined; thudding, thudding). I burn sage over the bed and vacuum the ash and hair (your short black ones, the occasional gray now you’ve begrudgingly entered your next decade). The extra dishes I wash by hand so as not to forget them in the dishwasher, one too many by the count. I empty the trash can, layered with condoms and candy wrappers. Out goes the recycling of clinking champagne bottles and caviar tins (to see what the fuss was about, as if the urgency of the situation demanded decadence, as if we wouldn’t choke on the circumstances).
What am I to say? Love can be: that old-world, organic pretense of lying in bed with the light dying outside, the curtains moved by seasonal mistrals; the playlist I built to explain everything in less than a thousand words; trailing my lips up and down the curves of your limbs, tasting my soap on your skin (it’s a miracle one of us hasn’t slipped under the other in the press of the square shower). When the superfluidity of words comes, I’ll simply tell you, though it won’t mean much, not after all that, and still you’ll wonder aloud if I mean it. Patiently, I’ll explain that this is no finite resource, that devotion to one is poorer than the richness of devotion to many. And we’ll question whether I’m not defending my actions, compensating within the overture of the slowly deepening shadows, while I sit and you lie there on the bed, and it finally comes to rest—silence, contentment at last.
After a particularly sweet red, you like to wax on the day we embarked, a wine tasting in the town over (sugar to soften the acid). My wedding band was hidden among a cheap set of rings forced onto various fingers, consciously done while I stood in my bathroom and invited you out, my phone resting on the porcelain edge. You knew better. No correction was made when people mindfully built the assumption of our togetherness, as the alternative would’ve been discomforting, wrong in plain daylight. It’s not that I don’t wish to reserve these memories, it’s just that I might find it too painful, to walk in and find that the cheap bottle we’d brought home that day open on the counter, a glass in a hand that is not yours, where suddenly it’s all skewed wrong.
I know you hate it when I disappear—I’ve begun to hate it too. Somewhere along the way it morphed from respite to urgency without notice. Once in a while you tell me the guilt is feasting again. And I thank you for the honesty (this is, in fact, the most honest relationship I’ve managed) and tell you I understand, but I don’t—how could I when I exist only on one side of the equation? One day I’ll cry when you leave or I do, and we’ll both be sad for a while or forever. I’ll feel the need to decide—not make a choice, never that. But decide if it’s going to be worthwhile to cry over. Thinking of you as mine is a horror, if I’m being honest (possessiveness has ruined humanity).
To work now. The door closes behind me, click, and on the other side of morality: quiet.
THE END
Author Bio: Morgan Kohler is a pilot and aeronautical engineer. She lives and writes in Southern California. Her work has been published in The Militant Grammarian, Neon Origami, and Bewildering Stories.