Controversy

In sickness and in health is open to interpretation, isn't it? In marriage we abide and tolerate because we love, not because our spouse is an image of flawlessness while retching into the toilet after a few too many beers, or because when they are fevered they are not whiny and prone to outrageous demands; for rich or for poor does not mean we will not complain when the rent is late, or consider ourselves fiscally responsible enough to tell our partners how to spend their tax return. We do it because our good times are really good, not because we haven't any bad times, because without bad times, without doing it not because we wouldn't rather be doing something - or occasionally even someone else - making such vows are empty.

It's about what's hard, not what's easy.

I got into a car accident today. It will be expensive to repair my - my husband's - car. It was an accident, but I was cited at fault. The absence of injury of either party, myself or the other driver, makes it easier to be angry and point fingers, to talk about carelessness and catastrophe. When my tears have stopped and there's room to start worrying about things like tow trucks and fines, I am afraid to draw attention to the guilt that I feel, the desire I have to be comforted. I want to be tough, I want to take responsibility, I want to be loved for not having fucked up in the first place.

I don't expect to be coddled when I've made mistakes, but goddamn is it hard when I'm not.

Petals like Pinwheels

I've finally parted with my bouquet. When we returned from our honeymoon and it was hanging on by a thread in a vase of stagnant water, I dumped the water out and returned it to the window. In the past week the stems had begun to mold, white threads like spider's silk cottoning between the withered heads of roses and chrysanthemums. I held it where it was bound still by the ribbon from my wedding dress, lifting the wilted purple sprays and letting them slump again where they had dried.

So I took the bouquet outside and up the little slope of our backyard, which is more like a thicket than something suited for mowing. I stepped through the maple saplings and honeysuckle heavy with berries to the hollow tree stump and tossed my flowers inside, feeling like a girl inventing superstition again, burying something in hopes that it would grow into a new mystery.

It was harder to do than I thought it would be.

Question and Answer

I'm relieved to no longer be engaged and suffer questions like, so what are your colors?

Being newly married, however, means I'm always being asked, so how is married life?

My answer that it is a lot like unmarried life is getting a little tired. I wonder if I should invent a fiction for us? We argue about life insurance policies? I've taken to wearing aprons while cooking, cleaning, and having sex? Seems like a solid short story to me.

The Egg Someday a Woman

On hour four of our five hour drive home, there is nothing more that we want to listen to beyond breathing, the hum of the road. I recline my seat completely, loose the zipper of my party dress and curl there under my winter coat.

You start at my neck where spine gives way to scalp, fingers and nails unraveling my hastily dressed hair and my nerves. My shoulders are clay; your prints someday will be prehistoric, a history I will read in photographs when I am too wrinkled to see. I think this must be why you take pictures of me when I am undressed, so that we will both remember.

The knobs of my back are neither piano keys, guitar strings, nor the glossy depressions of brass instruments. I am more like a dinosaur who has lost her plates, who lathers daily in foaming soaps and sweet lotions to keep from showing my reptilian nature. I am dry and I hold my tongue behind my teeth not because it is forked, but because it is more like a club than an organ for chatter, pleasure, or song.

You touch me anyway where my dress falls open down my back, a silk skin I am shedding; you abandon the limits of this aperture for a hand up my skirt. I open my eyes and through the window I look beyond my own smoky reflection to the night sky, and when you put your fingers in me I see in every constellation a vessel I must fill.

Ground Control

David Bowie croons while we brush and floss our teeth, and I begin bouncing when Space Oddity reaches a climax. The mirror is flecked and my reflection giddy, while M makes all of the usual, exaggerated faces. I love him best when he unveils himself in foolishness, in monstrous contortions of his features, like a child, trying to see if hideous will stick.

I woke up sick today. Every stomach upset worries me now that I shall become unexpectedly pregnant, though I'm more in danger from vitamins taken without something to settle them, meals at odd hours or missed all together, twice the usual calories in drink. It is difficult to imagine our lives making room for a child; we're more like novelized versions of ourselves when I do imagine it, the abstract future, a readiness I can't imagine anyone ever really having, only assuming or pretending that they do.

Though this may be what I tell myself.

He's turned out the lights and so must I now turn off, too.

Near Enough to Burn

There are many things I've started to write in my mind, lately, that never quite made it to any page, paper or otherwise. Feeling more like myself means gathering library books, cooking new things, browsing obsessively for cognac leather boots. I do not want to write about the wedding or the honeymoon, or at least do not want to using those words. It came and blazed and went, and we were elated for it.

I'd like to write about being unable to keep from peeking at the sizes in my mother's blouse, bra and jeans that she left at the reception - not from any illicit activity, but because she helped to decorate and changed into her dress there after wards, accidentally leaving her things for me to gather and ship. She is smaller than I am, in numbers anyway, and I smaller than she in character. She never looked in my diary, after all.

I'd like to write about the false gas fireplace in the second hotel M and I shared, how he turned the television a full ninety degrees so he could sit in front of it, near enough to burn if the flames had been real instead of as far from it as the cotton tatters blown from a plastic Halloween lantern. How this picture of him, his pale body and hairy legs, is the picture of my husband and my greatest delight. His lap did not seem complete without my head in it, his arms empty as anchors dangling without a ship. So I sat with him.

Cheap hotel rooms can really sometimes feel like palaces.

There Is No Try

M offered me Nyquil last night so I could sleep, and tonight I've made precautions of my own: a hot shower, various attempts to combat my hairy ancestry, and the generous scents of honeysuckle and patchouli, in the spirit of Cassandra, moisturizing me. I am hoping to avoid worrying the corners of my pillow with everything that yet needs doing, my groans of frustration and midnight dashes to the computer to write an email or three, to add or check something off of this or that list, stifled or resisted alltogether. There is a cat and a man sleeping in this bed as well as me, after all; shouldn't we all get to have sweet dreams of the wedding being over?

Besides, festivities begin tomorrow and we'll have house guests, too, and I know there's no sense worrying about what's going to happen no matter what I do or do not do.

Maybe that's just the lotion talking.