/ Smoke

In the middle of anguish and hopelessness, such a moment as to throw you back on your heels and laugh at the senselessness of it all, when she crawls across the kitchen and in her loudest voice yelps like a puppy, rolls over onto her back and wags an imaginary tail. We are going to need more moments like these, not to get through, but to catalogue for a future stroll, look back on times I know we will desperately miss. You will never be as happy as you were in the past, and long for it.

I am trying to smile and am being met with the stubborness of the muscles in my face. I will not drink. I will not. I can't.

For some reason, I am overcome by the impossible urge to eat hot dogs. There is one left in the fridge, the one we bought as our first major appliance, years ago in Kansas. Are we READY for appliances? we thought. Should we go out for dinner? Who buys the card? Do we play in the box afterwards? Which end is UP?

I don't know anymore, what with the lack of signage on her face, on my own.

I am turning into that other person I always seem to read about. I take it as no small consolation that I do not derive any pleasure from that other person's struggle. I turn my head away from wrecks, as a general rule. I am frightened these days of mirrors. I have a house full of them.

There are homes along the drive covered in rooftops. Buried underneath years of tar and paper you might find what was once a mobile home, but which is now firmly planted two feet into the ground, weighted down by repairs masquerading as new beginnings, and to stand atop one of these structures and tear away at the surface is to understand how wholly unprepared we are to separate from each other, even as the belongings burn away inside.

Twice already, we have tried in the last month alone, and it is maddening to think that even if we could or wanted to, it would be an exercise in futility, trying to read a map prepared by the ship's poet, beware the curves of Gibraltar, know when to love well enough alone. "I changed my mind," she says. "I couldn't stop thinking that one day you might be a famous writer, and then I'd be bitter and angry."

I had to blink twice, the gloriousness of her response. I wanted to reach through the phone and hold her, fold her into a pocket square and whisper reassurances to my lapel until we get this right. She makes me laugh at the unseemliest of times, at improprieties too dolorous to name.