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.
Written by Jason Wright
June 26, 2018
