Afternoon Sun

And other incredibly dangerous things.

The heat hits me in the chest like an atomic bomb. It is the first sunny afternoon in an otherwise dreary and horrific winter-scape of sleet, snow, rain, and wind. The man I am going to marry is off to play Dungeons and Dragons, because apparently that is something I get to say now. Fiance. Dungeons and Dragons. Going to marry. All are strange in my mouth.

Last night, I sobbed, half-naked on the edge of the bathtub, for forty-five minutes. He didn’t wake up. I was two feet away from him, just on the other side of the wooden door. I am trying to be a writer, when I can. Every day I wonder if I have the strength to be married. If I have the strength to not be married. If I can keep bottling every truth into fiction, if I can keep shoving my emotions down my throat and expecting my body to swallow.

Today, though, it is eighty degrees outside. The sun is refusing to set early. The birds are having an absolute rave outside, cackling in the trees and swooping around in my front yard. I watch them with their wings, careening in open space. I decide I’ll make an Aperol Spritz. I do not have Aperol, I have Campari, but its all the same when its in your stomach. For some reason, we have a tiny bottle of prosecco in the drawer of our fridge. It must be my roommate’s. She moved out two months ago, when she got fired and dumped me as friend and stopped responding to my texts. I pour it into my Campari and it has no bubbles. It’s flattened, somehow. Empty of its purpose. Time can have that effect.

I sit outside in the metal chairs left behind by a former tenant. They are uncomfortable but familiar and I sit in one, kick my legs up on the other, letting the Campari settle on my tongue. I only ever knew one person who drank Campari Spritz. My ex-boyfriend, when we were in Italy for three weeks, and he used denture cream as toothpaste until I told him he was out of his mind. I bought new toothpaste. I managed him like a boy band, letting his charm lead on the stage while I folded his underwear behind closed doors. I still love him, on a day like today. When the sun is out and I feel like I have endless time, I’m bathing in it, up to my armpits, feeling the warmth of opportunity. If there was eternity, if I couldn’t die, I would have spent a hundred more years with him, letting him torture me with his stupidity and his sexuality, perfectly merged in some sort of animalistic passion.

But I am a woman. And my time is not endless, but rather contrived. Pre-ordained. The eggs are rotting, every day.

My new man is perfect, most of the time. But he is still a man. And he still disappoints me, in the way his mind works, the purity of his heart. The delay of the inevitable. Men are always delaying the inevitable. They are saying it is fine, and their heads are rolling around on the floor.

He told me I could take the summer off, write all I wanted. Get published. Make a life change. But here I am hammered, on LinkedIn, looking at full-time jobs while the dog whines inside and my butt goes numb from these fucking chairs. He hates his job, he hates his female boss for micro-managing him. He wants a new job, he sends me jobs, he needs support. None of this is wrong. None of it is right.

We split the cost of the wedding rings, and I put a lot of stuff on my credit card. We split the rent and he pays for groceries and I haven’t bought a drink out in ages. But I never bought drinks out, before. It is strange to be in a relationship with someone and they think they are giving you so much financially, but I was given it before. For far less. He is taking up space in my bed and eating my apples and leaving underwear on the floor. Before, I got a Michelin-starred dinner and didn’t even have to open my legs. Before, nobody loved me, but everybody else paid the bill.

Modernity, in a paragraph. Caught between two worlds, ever-shifting. What do you want? What are you willing to give up?

The loud girl next door takes her dog out and it pisses, then she brings it back inside. That’s how I feel when I write. Like I’m pissing in the grass, and then someone brings me back inside. To reality. To a place where there are walls and few windows and nothing to fucking do.

I sit in the sun until it sets. I drink Campari until my mouth tastes like a memory. At the end of the night, when the mosquitoes are biting, I go inside.