I knew we were poison when loving her started to look a lot like hating myself, and when I could no longer consume without tasting the bite of her venom. She told me that if I loved her then I would tell her. Yet when she said those three words to me the same phrase fell from my mouth and onto the floor before I realized what I had done.
I never asked her what she was doing because I couldn’t picture her doing nothing like I could picture her on the way here. And I laughed at her when she asked me if I thought my boyfriend was prettier than her. But she only lived in the first time I got to know what I was, and what I was, was on fire. I loved her the way an animal loves gnawing off its own limb caught in a bear trap. Disgusting, isn’t it?
Whenever it rained she couldn’t get out of bed for two days. Not because the rain made her sad, but because of the earth worms. They would take refuge from their flooding homes onto our sidewalk to get crushed by faceless pedestrians, or dry up like their dirt shelters in the sun. She used to tell me on sunny days that alone we were both miraculous, so together we would be nothing short of an act of God. But on stormy days however, she told me that God was poorly written metaphor. Now she just watches me repeatedly refold my napkin in my lap.
It seems we always make excuses for the people we wish were different. Three days before I left she held her hand out and asked me if I wanted the world as if it wasn’t written all over my face. It rained the day before I left. She was watching the earth worms on our sidewalk when I packed up my binoculars and picked up those three words I dropped on our floor many months ago. She turned and said, “You either love me forever, or you never did.” And I explained how I would no longer allow her to lead me to pieces, and shut the door.