#superfluoussincerity

I. One sweaty-palmed evening, thumbing through his phone while he lay sleeping, a realization hit me: I was cheating on Trust with my Jealousy.

If Jealousy was a third wheel, it would be a flat tire. It would be a Mad Max machine sinking its teeth into Subaru.

Jealousy warned my pimples popped holes in his libido; said my slight scoliosis was a major disappointment; promised he prayed my teeth would melt to her shape- round yet flat.

Ten times a night Jealousy called, demanding that I track him out of the corner of my eye until my vision crossed. It was getting clingy. I was getting dizzy.

II. So, I broke up with my Jealousy, buried it deep beneath a Dead Sea; with Styx and stones on top. Bedazzled it with bricks and watched it drop.

Strained salt from saline to ensure it’d sink. A palm between scapula shoved it off the brink.

I broke the habit’s knobby knees; fed its false honey to blaspheming bees.

Snipped the leash and wreathed a noose. Pulled the teeth and set them loose.

Dammed the mouth of the River Lies. Cried out the last of my self-pity cries.

From Jealousy’s burdens my mind was finally free. It was then that I started, in earnest, to trust in Trust and to love me.

III. Three weeks later, Jealousy’s ghost came calling, meowed like a Siamese- LOUD.

Claws tried to stitch the itch back into fingertip.

Whispers sang the familiar siren pop-hit, “Baby Check Phone One More Time”;

The panic spread like poison ivy. But I will no longer let this feeling drive me.  

I shifted into goodbye; I insisted that it go. Felt the ecstasy of limits, the triumph of saying NO.

I sent the phantom packing, with a pat on its head; “We can still be friends,” it bluffed, its cheeks going red.

“No not friends; but we will be memories.” As I turned my back, the door closed with ease.

You have no place here with me; with me and him; just us two. Driving smooth, driving love, in our all wheel Subaru.

Crisp click echoes from the corner’s crooked spine.

click, hush click, hush click, hush.

Curious I come to uncover the catalyst:

Spider’s web hammocked from wall to wall like bleached cotton candy in some stomach.

Inside an insect wriggles, strokes, swims unsuccessfully through the sea of silk, spun soft but strong.

My eyes ping pong from captive to captor; watch, she approaches in graceful strides to silence her supper.

Slowly she swirls the beetle’s body on the spit of her spinneret.

Spider envelops beetle in a sticky tomb, tucking her meal in napkins bone white, polite not to spill.

Remembering my own dinner waiting in the kitchen, I turn to walk away; the ghost of click crawls along the seams of the wallpaper, following close behind.

I do not stop; I do not turn back; I click the suffering closed. I have practiced the art of clicking away.

Between mouthfuls of spaghetti, I click away from waterlogged eyes of refugees barely bobbing on a sea that is thirsty for their sinking.

With butterfingers, I click away from the headline telling of another body stripped of breath because of its blackness.

At the last course, I click closed the story of the people who my people are not treating like true people.

My apathy lives, safe and fat, like a king inside a castle of click-aways.

Click, I hear again, from the bedroom. It’s a last call; it’s a deathbed prayer. Click on the remote to raise the volume.

Below, Indiana farms unfurl flatly, quilting themselves together into one flawless fitted sheet.

A thousand miles away, destination checks its watch; there, my mom is setting out my summer sheets; smoothing them over with her soft, expert touch.

Somewhere above Pennsylvania a fitted sheet falters, buckles, settles into a sea of swells;

the wavelengths of cotton begin to arch their backs, stretching out in the summer sun.

With a cold water shock, the ocean pulls me out of my simile.

It slips into the scene silently, a sure swatch of cerulean smeared across the small of the land’s back.

The boats below bob diminutive like bathtub skiffs, and the waves are wiggles which could be drawn with a watercolor pencil.

But perspective plays tricks; I know Atlantic vastness. I have taken it into my throat and tasted ancient immensity.

Beside me a young girl reaches again for her gum, which spools out like a long violet ribbon.

She doesn’t so much pop it in her mouth as reel it in slow with her teeth; the sugary grape scent washes me in purple nostalgia.

“Look dad,” says my seatmate across the aisle to a man with glasses balanced on his smile lines.

He replies, “That’s Boston.” “Wow”, she breathes, her gum gone silent in her gaping mouth.

Pride blows a bubble in my chest so full that it brushes my rib cage.

My lips grin down at my home state, one earbud dangling, one ear open to the fawning of flatland tourists over my origins.  

Boston is a story I’ve told Midwesterners over and over and over again, in the mythic rhythm of the shore.

I’ve breathed tales of the White Mountains of New Hampshire with elevated adjectives that rise into a pop-up book; My finger thrusts to the summit;“ See, I’ve swapped spit with the sky.”

The watercolor adjectives I’ve used fall short seeing it here now.

Boston is heavy with hard history, whispered buildings, and tall memories.

Soon I will stand on a pier, thrust my thirsty tongue into the air, and catch the tiny crystals of sea salt like snowflakes.

Fingertips dip into skin, stick at bone, rush across ribcage, like xylophone tiles; catching curled at collar bone, knocking on knee.

At breakfast on our first school day, my preschoolers and I meditate on milk; on how it helps your bones “get strong”.

The word “strong” leaves its ripples across my self consciousness.

Today I was brave; not because I walked through doors of something new, free of fear.

But because I took fear’s sweaty palm and said, “Come on, now; we know each other well by now. Let’s do it, together this time.”

Maybe fear is like milk; maybe you swallow it and your bones grow strong.

When I teach four year olds that Little Red Riding hood was brave, it’s not because she didn’t scream when she saw the wolf beneath grandma’s bonnet;

it’s because she screamed and she stayed and fed Big Bad Milk Bones until he regurgitated granny.

Maybe brave is the sparkly fossil left by fear’s heavy dinosaur.

7 My mom told me when she was young she vowed never to date a smoker. She wanted a cowboy, fresh plucked from the countryside, horse to boot.

She fell in love with my dad, whose horse was a Harley and who wore a Navy tattoo on his shoulder in place of a braided lasso.

8 I know she hates the smell of the tobacco in his mustache and the sour alcohol imprinted on his taste buds.

I know the words that walk the plank of his tongue some nights must make her feel like a shipwreck.

I know this is life is spicier than she imagined. But she never draws an X across his lips, across his fingertips, across his DNA.

9 And watching them, I don’t know if I’m learning how to love or be loved in a way that is healthy.

But I know that I’m learning recipes for empathy, charting maps to common ground, and exhaling all that second-hand smoke one puff at a time.  

10 I do know that I want to be like my mom. Strong in the gentlest ways; Gentle in the strongest way.

So I write down her recipes. The PEPPER is bolded; I add a “sea” before salt.

1   Mama powders the beef black -specked with pepper as it sizzles, spiced for the sauce; everyone knows mama makes a mean spaghetti.

Out in the smoke-stained garage, Daddy makes a mean drunk.

He’s got his reading glasses on, squinting to decipher the mixed messages in fourteen empty bottles; they gape wordlessly, outlining an island as they surround his sodden sneakers.

(See, Daddy was a sailor some time ago; and see, Daddy feels safer somehow when his cells sway to a sort of slosh; we don’t have a boat so daddy takes to pouring down his throat to make an ocean inside.)

2 I wasn’t there that night, but legend left its licks.

Daddy thought the spice much too spicy, making him nauseous even, skewing his vision even, rashing his skin up too.

Now in the spice drawer there sits silently a white square box of “McCormick Pure Ground Black Pepper” scrawled with six black Sharpie Xs

scratching out the surface, banishing its use, warning those of its poison potency, memorializing a mistake never again to be made.

3 “He said sorry after,” Mom said, when I asked about it. There were probably pancakes too. Apology breakfasts are a morning-after tradition

so well observed that I can taste the sweetness of syrup each time I say or hear the word, “sorry”; a kind of sugar-speech synesthesia.

But even the fluffiest waffles can’t erase the permanent marker of memory.

4 Evidence of the rogue waves sloshing up onto the shores of his tongue and knuckles hide around the house like self-buried treasure, marked with invisible Xs;

like bruises behind band-aids, the blood so urgent and dark underneath that they shine their screams straight through the tan plastic’s “hush”.

The dimmer switch in the living room chipped like a tooth with its lights punched out; X

The black, spade-shaped stain on the gray carpet. X

The bald spot on the cat’s tail tip X

The part of me that is terrified to go puddle jumping in wine coolers and find myself stuck in the rip -tide grip of need. X

The unspoken “how could you”s that hang heavy in the air; X

the “I DON’T forgive you; not yet, not today” which we never dare breathe, which we carry like tar in our black lungs. X

5 I’ve been drawing my own Xs on his cigarette boxes in red crayon ever since my hand could fan away the fumes.

He got used to it, came to expect it, almost didn’t recognize the brand years later when I gave up.

We all did; give up, I mean.  

:( I hope you feel better.