Her kitchen is full of mistakes tonight—salt where there should be sugar, not an uncracked egg to be found, a hair resting on the surface of the soup.
She was more careful, once, with her measurements, with her ingredients, with her mise en place. But tonight, she went from too cautious to not cautious enough, and her dinner has turned bitter in her mouth.
Thin ice tightropes are my specialty, all slim-slippery, all risky-deadly, but magical when my footing holds and it all works out.
I am bruised, yes. But I know what it feels like to make it across.
Scratch that.
I hope, someday, I’ll know.
“Marriage is work,” people will offer, unsolicited, their advice plucked from their own lives, their love or lack of it, their own story.
But, marriage can be words juxtaposed in a way no one thought of before, the surprise turn inside a jazz phrase, a life built so creatively that two become more beautiful, more whole, as one.
Even moments of dissonance cannot quell the optimism of a song sung, low and sweet, in the ear under a cathedral ceiling. That is your story. That is your melody, resolving joyfully, resolving with the notes that both of you know by heart.
*For Roger and Michelle, on their wedding day
She never asked about the ugly parts until later, skimming over them as if they were still water. It was her downfall always, ever-drowning the fire later. No matter how small the droplets of good, she only saw them and nothing else.
Here is this about that. You can’t call it blindsiding if you’re just not looking.
“I asked for this,” she said. “I mean, didn’t I ask for this?”
He shrugged, not sure whether to stay or go.
“This, in fact, is what I demanded,” she said. “I’m glad you made up your mind.”
He shrugged again, unclear, suddenly, whether he was comfortable with all these implications.
Nowhere was the cold so pronounced as there, even though we’d battened the hatches and turned up the heat.
We fought with icy hisses, sometimes using the things of the household—dirty dishes, an item of laundry on the floor, magazines out of place—as signs to each other that we had dropped the temperature to where it could no longer sustain life.
We asked for nothing more than enough time for the writing of it all, one letter at a time, word by word, written in ink that left Rorschach blots on our hands. A salmon swam up my left index finger where I accidentally touched the pen. A small heart bloomed at the base of my right thumb.
100 Proof 