Heartbreak Warfare

Its not long after that I leave.

These are not my streets. Not here, in the city. Its not my home. The sidewalk is uneven. One fracture diagonally cuts the pavement, and the next step finds the gum-tarred cement cracked vertically. They can’t even make their mistakes uniform. I even want to blame her for that.

I’ve got one hand on our– on her keys, and the other fighting finger against finger to untangle a piece of her hair from them. Its wrapped so tight around my skin I have to wonder if they’ll just end up the next pieces she amputates.

I see the lines of her body, stretched into the frame of every building,  looming apologetically in metal arches, shamed, writhing, and lain flat as the grate above the street’s tunnels.

I want to close my eyes but I only see her standing on our bed, stretching up as far as her arms will reach. The stain on the ceiling from where the water leaks is there too. Just a half foot from where her hands would be if she jumped.

She’s unscrewing the light bulb like it requires every cell she’s made of.

But she won’t answer me, just keeps twisting that dead bulb into the rusty socket. I want to knock it out of her hands. I want her to answer.

“Why did we really come out here?”

I want her to say that its for us, for the job she’s waited her whole life for. For the money. I want her to tell me to support her because this is her dream. If I loved her like I say I do, then I would get it. I want her to get angry, to be the one who has to get angry.
As soon as the bulb flickers to a blinding glow she snaps down to the mattress like a book falling shut. In the unflattering light of our bedroom she looks pale, or maybe like she hasn’t eaten and I wonder why she doesn’t cook anymore. I blame the stove that doesn’t work and the apartment that rises above a street filled with take-out places. I blame the city.

Her fingers clutch the duvet and I want to ask her if she’s dizzy because heights make her that way sometimes.

The moment before she speaks: her lips are parted and her face turns from the ceiling to the cat slinking across the carpet like, he too, wants a way out.

I want to stop her –want to say something– anything. And I reach for words that I must have put away a long time ago. Words for an emergency, stashed in something I could break open with a mallet. I grope for them; a panicked moment of raking through a unfamiliar medicine cabinet. There are no antacids for this.

The city.

Can’t I still blame it for everything? The taxis that never slow down long enough to see you, and the way every time I sneeze now its black with the air here. I wonder where she met him and if he’s walking the same block I am. I imagine that every man who bumps shoulders with me is him, getting in his last ditch effort to push me out. I nearly cause the collapse of a fifteen-year-old kid who stumbles a little too closely into my path.

I hate myself for coming here. For getting us that shitty apartment like we could dress it up and make it the two bedroom I’d nearly signed the rent check on, before saying everything would be okay.
And now its probably already gone and rented and homing someone who probably isn’t as sorry as I am now. I am sorry…sorry for letting her bring us here. Sorry for not fighting harder. Sorry for not wanting us enough. Sorry that she’s everywhere but in this with me.

But I can’t be the one who is sorry, which means I’m supposed to be the one who leaves.

*Inspired by the lyrics of John Mayer’s, “Heartbreak Warfare”

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