Summer’s Sighing Red and Orange and So Am I

 

Published: (1) Literati Magazine (2) Black Heart Magazine
Copyright © Jon Cor

 

The last time I saw her we were sitting somewhere along that red red shoreline, our toes plugged into the sand as if to recharge a love-battery or something. I asked her if two people can exhaust each other, if that time-limited period of doting and codependency we all know and love is all we’d ever have to offer each other. I wanted to know specifically if she felt capable of giving any more than that which she’d surely take by using humankind, the species, as a substitute for her name. But before I could phrase this without some modicum of passive-aggression she kissed me and whispered, “We’re not going to last, are we.”“I don’t know,” I said.“I wish I could be the girl that gets to meet you next.”

“What? Why.”

She didn’t answer. She looked into the sun as if into the fire that would ultimately consume us.

“Babe. What’s going on?”

“…Oh, God.”

Then she told me about the affair, about him. And in an instant all that we’d erected to support the future caved in on us; its twin like-it-or-not pillars.

Maybe I recalled The Talking Heads’ lyric: “This is not my beautiful wife.” But in retrospect I think I did that self-mythology thing we all do, relating our lives to fantastic stories such as Tristan & Iseult to contemplate, in this case, the death of a fable. I’d already started to mourn what felt like the loss of a family member. After eight years together she was my lover, best friend and proverbial sister.

This is why it felt like a mutually exclusive homicide.

I tried to rationalize just how human, necessary and harmless an infidelity ought to measure before marriage, children and/or any other “adulthood” anchor. We’re taught how to be babies, toddlers and teenagers. Conditioned, even.

But nobody talks about that rest-of-your-life part.

Sans Facebook, I shouldn’t have to know who she replaced me with. Thing is, I do, because as I look up or down or side-to-side in transit – and how else am I supposed to get to work – I’m reminded that she’s become a prima ballerina with the National Ballet of Canada; pictured as an almost decorative extension of what appears to be a taut-skinned and skating rink-blue eyed stag of a man.

It’s an ad for The Nutcracker again.

It’s an ad for my trust issues for my territorialism for my feeling that I’m going to be lied to to death. Like, what if she’d killed me instead of just… me?

What if she’d given me some kind of STD?

Oh, wait. That’s right.

She did.

Anyway, I’m over it. I have to be. I’m not strong enough to get through the night without throwing up over the side of the bed anymore. Whenever I do I end up thinking of the jellyfish those kids kept splashing against the rocks at the beach last year.

Of how she was there.

See, for a decade she was always, always, always there; like grace itself if you could give it a name, dress it up real nice and have sinfully Medieval sex with it.

But only the picture of grace.

Beautiful, self-entitled and bulimic, she played a kind of tragic figure in my life; tortured mortally by the mundane and the material. By so very dark a pessimism that it fascinated me like a superpower or a sexually-leveraged subpoena to kill myself might. She threw tantrums about not being born a popular Hollywood socialite. I was tolerant. She locked the bedroom door to cut herself. I was hopeful; despite inevitably staging a few manipulative theatrics of my own. Because she, no, we… we were going to be OK. Right?

You don’t have to like somebody to love them unconditionally.

Thing is, well, another thing I mean… is I was fucked up too. Alcoholic. Antisocial. And soon I had to think about it.

Sometimes a lover ties his or her arms around you like a noose; hugging those big white breaths of yours into small black gasps.

Sometimes you’re just a pair of lungs, too; sucking the air out of somebody else’s.

Like you probably, I can’t wait to get off at the next station.