She's so Heavy

A revelation – tea two days in a row instead of hot water.  It’s only because my mother helped me pack my lunch, her virtual checklist reminding me about my lack of tea bags.  It’s a comfort in the cold weather and in the chill of my life these days.  Now I find myself craving a fire in the fireplace, if I can afford the wood.  But it is too confused with fond memories of the man I now resent.  We’d drink one, sometimes two, bottles of champagne in front of the fireplace on cold winter nights.  Sometimes he came home to find dinner started and candles lighting the way up the stairs to our open concept living/dining area.  We’d have sex on soft blankets there, both more or less a little tipsy.  Only…he was drunk, I know that now.  But we never made love.  That was something about us that a side of me found endearing.  I thought it was my hard and callous side, but I now know it was my fearful side.  I was afraid that if we used the word love here, it might become polluted like our professed love for each other, for our persons.  If we lost the primal act of fucking, we might loose ourselves and our love would cross a boundary I was afraid to cross after first love shattered my heart.  Maybe this is somewhere at the root of my problem.  I was afraid to say make love.  Maybe if I had, things would be different now.  But alas “done bun, cannot be undone,” and all in all, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.

Yet, I want to break ties with the old.  I want to be able to say it now.  I’m close, but I can’t say it yet – maybe next time.

He stumbles up the stairs, late, candles never lit, dinner cooling.  I remember nights like this.  Nights when I tried, but the allure of the bar won out.  Nights when we pretended it wasn’t over when it started.  Nights when he pretended that the odor of gin and stale cigarettes was not a litmus test.  Nights when I’d pretend to pretend there wasn’t a problem.  Nights when some small measure of hope within me died.

Maybe I never said it, because it would never be true about him.

Perhaps someone else…