After your tv disappears and the dusty space lectures you, you read an article called “How to be alone” and think I cannot do that, I like being kissed too much.
And you will cry the sobs of someone driven toward madness, delivered to emptiness. You will laugh, alone, at the dinner table.
People who you thought loved you will suddenly stop loving you, without provocation or conversation.
Soon you will tell someone: "We are getting a divorce," and think, those are the words of someone older, someone braver, someone assured. Someone else.
There will be coffee dates with strange men who talk on and on about self-hypnosis and spinal manipulation and use words like ellipsis and tell you about their long walk home from catholic school. In the snow.
And there will be dates in bars at times when you used to be sleeping, where an invisible deejay spins a Barry White song and lucid girls with short-shorts play pool and laugh loudly. They are ten years younger than you, but seem to have the answer to the question “What kind of love is this your givin me?” in the way they flip their long hair.
People will tell you how much weight you’ve lost, how beautiful you look. How skinny you are, how you need to eat more.
And you will sleep on your side of the bed, sleep in the middle of the bed, sleep on the couch, sleep in the daytime, not sleep at all. You will buy a new bed.
You will take off your wedding ring and rub at the pale indentation on that weak finger and consider that that circle is like the rings on a tree, small grooves for every year you grew together towards the light and then split apart at the tops, like branches each trying to fight for space in the sky.
And you will feel like love will never come to you again, that it must not know where you live anymore. Until you hear its footstep on your front porch. Until you hear the “shave and a haircut, two bits” knock upon your heavy wooden door.
And you will hesitate before you open it, but you will still open it (of course you will).
And you will be glad you did.
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