We meet in the kitchen by accident, taking pills in the dark, trying not to wake our family. My sister selects Tylenol, and I take 3 ibuprofen with a side of Mylanta and a shot of Captain.

We wonder what will happen.

We lock the door, and wonder what's next. I wonder what's next for me, for her, for John C. Reilly, for the state of Utah, for the valves in my car, for the valves in my heart, for the emails I'll get and I'll give, for what our hair will do in the summer-Illinois-humidity. In pursuit of God's best, in reluctance we try to sacrifice everything else.

In one year these problems will be a joke. Maybe. We'll still be moving forward unless murder. Unless tornadoes. Unless rapture. Unless it works out for true love or fake love or job opportunities and new addresses. To new life that gets newer and more complex in the changing biology of choices.

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.

for the time being

When I love you
I love you very much.
And when I don't, it's a missing ocean in my life.
Happily landlocked I build cities and towns far away from you. The main feeling I feel is used-to-it.

What did I mean the most?
Between all of this: the very much used box of Kleenex and bottle of cough medicine...
Between beloved dogs abandoned for holidays in Arizona.
After I gave up my weekends, after I started the 60 hour work weeks, but before I became a real grown up.
Between reading fiction books, and then reading nonfiction books.
Between becoming and dissolving.
Between clocking in with my fingers, and clocking in with a picture of my face to a little magnetic sensor.
Between drinking candy for a living, and eating salads for lunch.
Somewhere in there is where I am now, and what I mean the most is that you can stand up tall. You were made clean, at least, somewhere in between 1988 and 2013, for better and for worse.

We might get our heads chopped off by everyone, or we might find romance and that thing of settling down in a house with a compost pile and, God-forbid, a minivan.

For now I'm just happy when the dogs are snoring, because that means they're not awake.