I play a numbers game in hopes of recalling the percentages, the statistics and rates and proportions of a love affair between two unknowns.
What is the sum total of a failed relationship?
There were seventeen summers before that summer when we met, and that was seventeen summers ago.
But we were both of us older than seventeen when we met and made love for nearly five hours, on the eighth day of the seventh month of the two-thousand-and-first year.
We spent nine weeks together; four of them happily.
I once waited seven days in his bedroom, reading five-hundred-seventy-six pages of “The Prince of Tides”… before I drove one hundred and forty-one miles, back to Ann Arbor and waited to be betrayed.
Betrayal arrived on my twenty-seventh birthday, the twelfth day of the eighth month, but I wouldn’t learn the truth for several more encounters.
On August thirteenth, which fell on the second day of the week, my stomach became partially paralyzed, and I’ve been sick every day since then.
Before he told me the truth, he sent me flowers, made love to me and tortured me with lies and abandonment… those flowers were like perfumed poison when I learned the truth and saw them wilting in my bedroom.
The last time we had sex was August twenty-fourth.
The first day that we met there were fireworks; beautiful bursts of poisonous flowers, omens which lit up our lives and then faded all too quickly… but our lust prevented us from seeing this prophetic truth as anything other than celebratory pyrotechnics.
Numbers are often deceptive because they don’t truly reveal the truth with the accuracy that they are ascribed; they don’t calculate the geometry of emotion or the calculus of grief and lust and shame.
Every number that walks through the door can determine our differential and satisfy our algebraic need for multiples; while concurrently erasing the totality of truth; simultaneous equations of salvation and destruction.
Numbers, you’ll learn, can be vicious… because numbers will often lie.
This book of words is falling apart while makeup mistress weaves together a patchwork creation meant to imitate perfection – free from the rhyming couplets that have held us all prisoner and made a fairytale of our dungeon.
The underground roars through hollow hills beneath beautiful graveyard labyrinths – a necropolis that invites the living to congregate with the dead: the mouldering corpses of past aspirations, childhood dreamscapes and unfinished poetry.
In an autumnal sunset over a long Decembered spring awakening lies a barely remembered ginger haired mutant of a carcass.
Seventeen summers have taken that once orgasmic beauty and flayed him into living dead road kill swollen skull dried up brains in that monstrous Mount Rushmore sized flesh blossom.
Lucky to have had him before he was this completely ugly unfortunate thing.
Long before his wickedness was so outwardly apparent for all the world to see.
