100 Proof

Nearly a month after the wineglass shattered, light through the living room window glinted on another wayward shard, 15 steps away from the site of the breakage.

I picked it up and turned it over and over in my palm. This is how it is, I thought. There’s that moment of breakage, but weeks of finding pieces of glass in the most unexpected places do not let you forget that initial disintegration.

“Have you talked to him?” asked my mother.

“No, not since I left,” I said.

“What about the other one?” she asked.

“The other one,” I said. “Yeah, he says he wants to get together, but when I actually ask him about a specific time, he’s never available.”

“He’s afraid of relationships,” she said.

“They’re all afraid of relationships,” I said.

Here is the thing about being married: it’s hard, it’s work, it’s sometimes lonely, it’s anti-selfish, except when it’s not, and then it’s awful.

But there is the sweet with the bitter. There are the moments when hands meet under a table, while watching kids on stage, in bed after a terrible fight. There are the moments when your eyes meet and you don’t have to say anything at all to know what each other is thinking.

This is why we do it again, and again, and sometimes more agains than that.

Spicy foods ease my troubled sinuses, my raw throat. Searing soup that bites back. Hot mustard. Salsa that, on other days, would daunt me. The layers of pain comfort, the sting self-inflicted muffles the symptoms visited by my body.

And this is how I end up surrounded by chandeliers and red paint, waiting on a banquet chair for a carry-out order of hot and sour soup. “Here, my friend,” says the waiter, handing me a glass of ice water. The cubes soothe, too, numbing my throat in advance of the imminent, fiery broth.

“Throw out peanuts,” the antiques hawker said. “He’ll follow you home.”

We checked our pockets, which were, sadly, legume-free. We left the ceramic elephant in that parking lot. He remained behind, waiting to follow someone else.