what do you do for a living?

“What’s on my mind is that scar on the left side of your face, right below the sharp edge of your jaw, how it looks like an arrow. How I wish I were brave enough to trace my finger like a road on a map until I hit somewhere to call home. When you drank your first beer, did you pretend to feel the buzz just to make the cool kids stop calling you a fucking loser? Or maybe you were the cool kid. Maybe you pressed cheap alcohol into the palms of kids like me. Careful kids. Color in the lines kids. Also, key lime pie. Specifically, my mom’s. Would you eat it? I know you hate pie, but how many girls’ moms’ pies have you eaten just to please some girl’s mom? A lot, I’m sure. Too many. But I like you. Even though you are a raging republican. Even though you practice dinner party talk in my bed. (Especially because I think that’s you trying to impress me.) And sometimes, when we dare to let the silence sit, I wonder if the first people to get married regretted it. Did they lie side-by-side five years past their vows and rearrange letters of the alphabet just to find the right word: Done. Damaged. Different. Devoid. Divide. Divorce. Yes, they thought, as they unlinked their hands. Divorce. Because it burns something ugly on the tongue. I wonder if we’ll ever get divorced before I remember that we aren’t married. We aren’t anything. Then, of course, I wonder, what the hell we’re doing. And on that note: Hell. Do you believe in it? Because I do. I think I do. At least I might. Or do you make up stories about the girl over there nose deep in the Bible or the man with no hair who keeps nodding off. The people on subways and street corners, half-awake. When you guess at their lives, are they happily ever afters with green grass lawns and dogs who don’t bark? Do they believe in hell? And even if they do and you do and suddenly you see some small fragment of yourself in the glass of her eyes, does that mean you won’t bury her jagged pieces so deep she loses her sharpness? And when she exhumes that grave and slips idiosyncrasies back under her skin like splinters, will you stay for something beyond the guilt? When she finally cracks open her mind just to let you peek at the bone and raw edges, will you even remember asking for all of this in the first place? No. Of course you won’t. So I smile. I stretch. You hold me like a question mark, quiet and careful and waiting. There are things you’d like me to say, but the silence is so much sweeter. Stranger hands wander down my waist, and you ask, once more, “What’s on your mind?” “Nothing,” I say. “I was just falling asleep.“”

“I don’t quite know how we’ve ended up here. How we’ve ended up as strangers when we used to spend nights staring at one another across the mattress, pointing and counting up quirks like constellations. I knew you loved me when you asked about the small bump beneath my lip that even I’d never noticed. You traced it with your thumb, something soft in those eyes. “Where did it come from?” you asked, like you’d give anything to see me in childhood just to know me more fully. That’s love, isn’t it? Not the sex or sacrifice or small talk you make after years of memorizing one another. It’s the digging, the prying, the eventual release. The discovery of your own uncharted territories. You saw me more clearly than I saw myself, and somehow you still walked away. Back then I thought you loved me so much that even if it crumbled, broke beyond repair, you’d stay. Touch my forgotten scar and sigh. When you left you said, “You’re all I’ve ever known” as if that was reason enough. It’s become blurry now, the certainty that you loved me once. More fresh are the fights, the never-framed photos. The times I prompted you to call me beautiful, begging for crumbs. I wish I could remember the lilt of your voice as you asked me that question. I stare across the mattress all too often. Alone in the dark, I can almost convince myself that you’re still here. I can almost feel you, fingers frozen on my face, so curious and consumed. Both of us barely breathing in wonder, unaware it would be the moment I’d miss most.”