One day your going to have to face the deep, dark truthful mirror
And it’s going to tell you things I still love you too much to say.
That’s Elvis Costello. It’s the last thing I wrote to my wife of fourteen years come the middle of next month. If things work out right she’ll be my ex-wife by then. I guess that makes her not my anything, though when I speak of her it won’t be an ex-wife. She already knew that was Elvis Costello. It’d be awfully cryptic to type if she didn’t.
These little pieces of prose are supposed to be barbs in the memory, something to catch your shirt-tail on, mutter a quick fuck and thumb through; you either just ruined your favorite analogous shirt or you found yesterdays jewel in todays shit. This is not one of those. If I could forget I would, and I could forgive up until my dog was gone.
The last thing she wrote me was some bullshit about how she did something but it didn’t work. Again, it’s not a barb I need. I know how and why she lies; like a child with sticky orange sugar on her cheeks insisting she didn’t take the last otter pop. There became such a dearth of otter pops the larder folded in on itself.
I would have come here anyhow and she would not have. There isn’t room for her here not in the broad sense; in the spatial sense there is far too much room here, inside and out, the air is heavy and thick with emptiness.
I’ve put more in trying to get divorced in the last four months than either of us had put into the marriage in the last four years. That’s not hyperbole or melancholia, not regret or remorse, and if I had an axe to grind it would be that a simple signature from her was all it would have taken.
Huh. Not much of a flash. Some words that don’t say much. Maybe more than I’ve said elsewhere. I’m a stranger here, it makes it easy.
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