I was standing over the corpse of my last relationship when the detective walked in. The world deconstructed under her gaze, a breed of aggressive disapproval that begged every inch of information from the scene. I felt compelled. I’ve been drawing conclusions, I told her. ‘Well then,’ she said, an iron reed, ‘show me what you’ve got.’ I passed her the little notebook I’d been carrying around. Taking a look at the cartoon heart I’d rendered, torn in two, she smiled from the inside. ‘Classic,’ she said, ‘I see it all the time. Obviously suicide.’ I’d fallen in love.
I press my forehead to hers and don’t say I love you. The scent of grape bubblegum lingers in the threads of her cotton summer dress. For a minute I’m five again and I don’t know anything, joy and pain are base and unaccounted for. I sense her skin is warm and smooth, but my nerves are inverted, all my efforts scrape against bone. The more I press the less I feel, every sensation dissolves in the search. Soon my flesh will melt entirely, I’ll be stood naked in garrulous detail, and she won’t say I love you too.
Voices on the fringes of frustrated rage, accusations and concessions until we reach the calm inside an argument, not quite impasse but exhaustion. We haven’t shared eyes in some time and the absent contact crests about us as both shield and threat. Are you going to leave me? I say. She takes my hand and flattens it between each of hers. Twenty-four carats settle in the curve between knuckles, calculated frisson in an occupied hollow. ‘I could never do that,’ she tells me, sighing with the piquant firmness of an avalanche, ‘it’s going to have to be you.’
I wish my skin were hers. I pry beneath her wrist, slipping my nails into subdermal territory. She doesn’t flinch. I think I’m not there so I squirm. The pain she notices, an irritation. ‘What are you doing,’ she says. Love, I say, love, over and over until the words are in her veins. Love, love, love, love. ‘Stop,’ she says, ‘you’re full of shit.’ And I let her say it because of smiles, but she doesn’t realise how much I give away and what flows in to fill the void. Love, I say, and listen for a pulse.
‘Nah, man,’ Jessie says, ‘it’s not like that. She still loves you, of course she does, she just wants you to love you too.’ He rubs at his nose idly and watches the other patrons mill. ‘It’s gotta be hard for her,’ he says, ‘I mean you’re pretty fucking annoying.’ Anyone else might have gotten under my skin, but I know what he means and how he means it. I’m told loving me is like living with an unscratchable itch. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he tells me, ‘I’ll always love you, just ease up on the torment and so will she.’
In the nothing space between songs I tell her, you remind me of somebody that I used to love. She drops my hand with deciduous firmness. ‘They all have bow strings,’ she says, even the drummer.’ Non-traditional is the norm now, I say, it’s the hipster hegemony celebrating snowflakes. She sips her vodka and looks out over the heads. ‘Pink is pink no matter how you shade it.’ The band plays on in dissonant symmetry. I reach to retake her hand and she pulls away. ‘I don’t want to be the same anymore,’ she says, ‘it’s not enough.’
The horrors follow me to bed, their call becomes inescapable and loops inside me like an empty chant. Wind in the darkness. I press myself against the crags of my partner’s sedation and look for comfort, digging at her rocky stillness. Mountain dwellers carve their homes out of the inhospitable. They find their peace in equalling adversity. You can’t be mad at nature. It is inscrutable. I apply myself again to the cold rigidity and say this into her hair. You are inscrutable. I love her for having no blame in this and fall asleep thinking of the knife.
I need you to hate me, I tell her. I don’t know why. I doubt it matters. I just, I’m not comfortable with love, it feels untenable, slippery. Hatred you can hold. You can mould. It’s elemental, material. I can be shaped from hatred. Love is like air with the oxygen sucked out, only atoms apart from suffocation. I love you though, now that I’ve made it sound hollow. So, maybe it’s an acceptance thing. Maybe I can’t accept other people’s feelings. I believe they’re real, only, there’s always going to be that distance, the unimpeachable distance of individuality.
Immediately, I felt bad for yelling, the sound still sharp in my throat, but I knew once the anger arrived it wouldn’t leave until it was fed. I would have to hurt her, tear out little pieces with my words in the way that only lovers can. It was that or face myself. Later, I would be forced to recount and recoil in disgust, not by her, not by my love and her passive stoicism, but by the showreel of failures I unspool in the night. A too familiar scene, another sizzling nail in the coffin I was building.
Gritting his teeth, he watched it draw closer. Watched the monstrosity drag itself across the cold linoleum floor. Watched it working at words through a palpating mess of blood and gore, what once was a mouth. He listened. A raspy hiss, a sound like cutter but more familiar, slurred and husky, sickeningly percussed by a slippery snick of teeth on bone. It was trying to say his name. He tightened his grip, shut his eyes and brought the axe down hard against his wife’s freckled neck, a mottled target. ‘I’ll always love you, Sunshine,’ he whispered into the silence.
A Few Short Words 