byshyp.com

You say you feel like swiss cheese, and I stroke your hair - our faces close in the bed illuminated by the incandescent light that burns feverishly from down the hall. You talk about loss. The loss of your childhood friend whom your father covered with a blanket on the snow covered road outside your house when you were eight. The way you didn’t understand what that gesture meant. Of the friend who lies dying in some distant hospital bed of an incurable disease. The anger you feel for being unable to stop it.

And as you apologize for being sad, I say there’s no reason for you to feel that you have to be happy at this moment. That sadness is a valid emotion. You look me in the eyes and then run to the bathroom.

I sit up in the bed. I listen as the water runs from the sink. The toilet flushes. I understand you are not coming out for awhile. I move from the bed and walk to the sun porch.

There I smoke one of your cigarettes and watch as cars pass through the intersection - the flashing of green, yellow, then red. I rub my foot the way you did earlier in the night in hopes the toe that is black from the stress of my relationships will heal. I rise.

I walk back down the hall and stand in the bedroom door. I squint my eyes to see if your tall, thin frame has returned to the bed, but I hear the water still running. I listen for awhile, waiting for any audible change, and then I walk to the kitchen.

I stand in front of the nine foot canvas we attacked just hours ago. I examine the feathers I dragged through the layers of wet paint we laid down three or four times first with brushes, then with our hands. I follow the textured wispy trails the veins left through the pastel purple, bright blue, deep red, and metallic gold.

Earlier, I took a break from throwing globs of acrylic with various paint brushes to watch your slender figure as it stood on the ugly green kitchen chair from the seventies. Your jeans and tee-shirt clung to your female form as it moved in gestures uniquely you against the monolith against the wall. I studied your curly hair tied back, your petite round nose, your protruding chin, your big brown eyes. I understood how beautiful you are.

I think when you come out, you will ask me to leave. That you may never call me again. It is because you asked me if I thought you were crazy earlier in the night, and at the time, I didn’t understand what you meant. As I stare at the canvas, I feel like I’m in car on an Indiana interstate gently swayed by the suspension oblivious to the speed I’m traveling as I watch the endless rolls of monotoned corn pass.

If I believed that something so perfect could last forever, then I would allow my insecurities to destroy this, but I’ve come to understand the temporal nature of relationships. They are organic, the sum of continuing interactions between irrational creatures. Like the fields next to the interstate, ours will change, but it evades any attempt to define it - to lay it down into a tidy geometry.

I feel drawn out over time like single dots in a graph, like rolls of corn in a Southern Indiana landscape, too spread out to collect my feelings into one single emotion. I know if you ask me to leave, my heart will break. I have accepted how I feel about you. It’s not a choice for me. As I stare at our canvas, I realize I can’t rationalize my way out of the hurt.

I hear you whimper from the bedroom. I hesitate to move my gaze from the wispy trail of a feather. Slowly I turn and with monolithic steps cross the kitchen, traverse the short hall and step into the bedroom.