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.
“So what did you have, and when?” asked a woman at the next bar table over.
“I had a little girl grandbaby on May 10,” said the other woman at the table. “She’s a Human Race baby. She was born on the Day of the Human Race.”
“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.
“I don’t know how to make you love me,” she said toward the end. And it was true—as accomplished as she was, as able as she was to set her mind on success, this one result eluded her grasp.
He never said anything in return. That’s the way he was—silent and monolithic, unable to make a statement on his own behalf.
I prefer the Civil War term. “Soldier’s Heart” is what I have, and mine is broken, bitten in half by the women and children I gunned down.
I did it for you, America. You asked for my protection, and I gave it. In return, the screaming wakens me, every night, after I’ve barely fallen asleep.
Across the street, the man in the rasta hat slams a hand—then the back of the same hand—against the green street sign pole. He is close enough to the bus stop to be waiting, but shifts his body in ways that make it clear he’s going to be there awhile.
He shouts into windows of passing cars while tapping a complex rhythm against his hip. From what I can tell, I am the only one paying him mind.
100 Proof 