One

When I am sitting in the car at night and it is raining and you are driving us to see someone and the drops are streaking down the windows and we are not talking to one another because talking would be too loud, I think that all the rain must come from women who have lost their babies, and if there were no more tears, if there were no more sadness, the grasses would become brown and the ground would become sandy and all the trees would go thirsty and the world would stop going. But that is not really what I think, I know it isn’t, because that sounds like a story and actually it isn’t like that until I try to tell it. It is a wordless hum and a hollow sphere of cloth in my head. From the center of the sphere, I am grabbing at the cloth and pulling it toward me from many angles all at once. I look out at the raindrops. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops. I follow the raindrops as they leave the edge of the window. I look through the raindrops. I look at the raindrops and through them at the same time. I become the raindrops and the window and the blurry wet red tail-lights going and the blurry wet white head-lights coming and the highway and the sadness and the shadows of trees that I cannot see because it is too dark out but I know they are there. It doesn’t matter where we’re going or who it is we’re going to see, because I can already see them, I can see everyone, and I can hear you even though we’re not talking, and I can hear my thoughts even though they are wordless and I can hear the silence and the hum and the engine and the crying of women who have lost their babies. I see now that I am not the only such woman. I leave the raindrops with my eyes but I do not leave them and I look at your thigh. You’re wearing new jeans and they have lighter stripes on them to make them look older than they are. I put my hand on the denim and I can feel the heat of your skin underneath and I look at my hand on your thigh and I cannot believe how beautiful my hand is, how it seems to glow more brightly even than the little blue lights on the dash or the red tail-lights going or the white head-lights coming, and you know not to talk to me because that is how well you know me.

Two

When we are together on the bed, my bed, in my rented room, and my skin is glowing a little, you ask me what I am thinking, and I don’t say, I don’t say, and then I say. I say You said I had to choose you. And I’m staring up at the ceiling which is off-white and not entirely level. It almost seems like it is sagging or caving in and sometimes I wonder if the people upstairs could fall through, and you say What? Sometimes you can’t hear me and sometimes it takes you a second or two to hear me but you ask me to repeat myself before the second or two is up and right in the middle of my saying You said I had to choose you for the second time you hear me saying it for the first time. Choose me? Hmm. I don’t know what I would have meant by that. It might be that you really don’t remember saying it or it might just be that you want me to prove that I remember. You said it wasn’t enough to just have you for a backup, in case that other thing didn’t work out, but that I had to choose you. And you say Well, of course, no one wants to be the backup. That wouldn’t be good enough for anyone. No, I suppose it wouldn’t, I say, and well, anyway, I’m choosing you. YOU ARE?! you ask loudly, and I am, I answer quietly. Then you kiss me and it is alright, it is really alright. We kiss for a while until you move back a little so you can look into my face without my two eyes merging into one eye and you say, but what do you mean by that? And I don’t say.

Three

When we are staying in a hotel room in a cheap, tacky state in which neither of us live, there are mirrors everywhere. The room smells like cigarette smoke and air freshener. He has been making love to me, but suspects I may not be enjoying it. It is hard to tell with me. Sometimes I resist and sometimes I pretend to resist. Sometimes I am sad and sometimes I pretend to be sad. Sometimes my body goes so still. The morning light is coming in strips between the curtains, making stripes across my back.

Do you want me to get you a latte? Do you want breakfast? Do you want me to fuck you some more? Do you want to just lie here? Do you want me to get off of you? he asks.

I make a wimpery sound in the back of my throat and bury my face in his armpit. He strokes my hair. He can’t get over how beautiful I am. He can get an erection just thinking about me, and here I am, right here, in bed with him. I came all the way out here to be with him.

I understand how you want me to make the decisions, but I can’t make you happy if you don’t tell me what you want.

I think about his list of choices — the latte, the lovemaking — and I choose one in my mind but I don’t say anything because it might not be the right choice, it might not be the one he wants. He is always saying he only wants to do what I want to do, but I don’t believe him.

It’s too early to want things, I say.

I should know it’s pointless to ask.

Will you scratch my back?

He scratches my back, very softly, like he is raking a miniature Zen garden, and I say Mmm. My spine isn’t quite straight and I have a pimple. He rakes around the pimple and through the down on my lower back.