hemingway and me

You promised I'd get to be a sailor, after I did all of the hard things we've all gotta do. You said we'd get away and eat fish raw from the ocean, and lay out on the deck under the big huge moon and drink wine til 3 in the morning. You said you'd cook me eggs for breakfast and we'd read in our bunk and every day would be Saturday in the same way that every day'd be Monday in all the good ways and all the bad ways that come of working hard and working with your hands and taking leisure very seriously and being in love and making someone else belong to you.

When you wake up, there are pieces missing from the story, and you're so thirsty for water and you have to pee and find yourself crying in the bathroom and you want the dreams to go away and everything smells like Lysol and there are pillow lines on your face.

In the real life we went in different directions for good reasons. You--too much a liberal and smirking, thinking me naive. Me, trusting in God supremely because I see the world dirtier than you do. The questions would have come up later, but I made them come up right away so we could save time getting back and used to being by ourselves for breakfast and lunch  and under trees and in hallways and having the whole bed to ourselves.

We won't get to go fishing, I think. We won't get out, even in a small boat so that we don't sink a ship.