the habit of being

It’s 3 in the morning and I’m doing laundry and he’s sleeping in our little bed. I was there but then he asked me what I was thinking about and I said nothing, pause, and then I asked him what he was thinking about and he said Moving To New Mexico, longer pause, and then I said I wasn’t All That Tired, really, and he said “Shh.” So I started crying and he said what’s the matter, pause, what’s the matter? I’m just lonely, I said, and he whispered sorry. And I tried rolling over a few times, then just got up and went into the bathroom and put my jeans and my tee-shirt back on, and the dirty clothes were carpetting the hallway from the bathroom to the kitchen. It’s probably been a month, since we’ve done laundry. He’s never done it, the entire time we’ve lived here, though he tried while I was in Georgia for Christmas, only we were out of detergent so he just left the pile of clothes sitting in front of the washer. So I started getting the black things together and making piles. I stacked up all the dirty dishes in the sink and poured Comet all over the counter. There was this crystalline mound from where the white sugar was leaking. I scraped it off with the dull chef’s knife. I put some trash in a trashbag. There are trashbags just sitting open. An empty jar of sundried tomatoes in oil. Yogurt cups. Garlic skins. Little paper pouches that used to hold Annie’s Organic Mac and Cheese. I got Comet on the dishes; maybe we’ll get sick. My hands reek of it. All the Crud did not come off the counter, though I let it soak all the way through the first load.

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I remember when every paragraph I wrote and every picture I took and every adjective I used was for him. I created myself for him and the self I imagined that he imagined was the self I most wanted to embody constantly, the self I most adored. She was magical. She was surreal. She was the channel through which I pored myself whole-heartedly, I gave myself without hesitation. It is not that she was not real. She was very real. I was very in love with her. I was in love with her and I was in love with him and I was so very much in love with him in love with her. It was everything. It was dragons and pearls.

While we were travelling, I wrote to get away from him. At first I read him my journals, and then things got so bad I could not stand the thought of it. It was surreal.

It is a struggle, even now, to use “him” instead of “you.” I feel that we are still intimate this way, in this dialogue I keep with myself and my “you.” I am still writing for him, about him, in reaction to him. This is the only time we talk. And he is asleep and it is now after 4 and I have been reading love letters entirely beyond my scope, remembering when I wrote that way, about forever and hope. About perfection and connection, about the future, about the past. Every second I wanted to show him, every movement.

He wrote me a love letter once, about the axis mundi. I look at him and I cannot imagine him saying such things to me now. What must he see in me? I was so open. Now I am quite terrified, shocked silent. If I am afraid to give my words, what can I give?