Imagine that someone tips you off about a race.

What kind of race, you ask, and I am stuck, stumped, stopped, because I’ve never been to a race before. Never, you ask again, but lazily, you’re hardly aware that you’ve asked. Smoke comes out of your nostrils and mouth, climbing slowly towards the heavens only to be blocked, its hopes blotted, by an enlarged photograph of Andrew Bird that you’ve tacked onto your ceiling with something sticky.

It’s tape, you say, turning away from me, your bare-back curling into a U, and I wonder if it symbolizes me, or perhaps it’s you, the you that’s stealing away from me under a pretense of tiredness; it’s actually defeat; you’re enveloped in listlessness. Listlessness, my parents used to yell at me in their silent, missing voices, their fingers scrambling to tell me as fast as possible, faster than my could follow, that I was a good for nothing. I would smile at them, and look away from their fingers, their bird-like movements, glancing at anything that wasn’t them, savoring the silence that was them. Listlessness, I whisper to you. You turn your head ever so slightly, wisps of hair shift from your side to mine, the amber is beautiful, I should tell you. Listlessness, your voice wafts up, following the smoke; you don’t know my parents, you don’t know what it means, it  drifts out the window, perhaps falling into a crack in the pavement, perhaps bludgeoning someone to death outside, down there.

I want a divorce, your voice comes to me through a hazy, smoky fog, and I smile, because you say this once a month, because you don’t mean it, because we’re not married. But I understand what you mean. You want a clean cut, a new sheet, everything a divorce is supposed to guarantee. You don’t want my stubble, the smell of my body, my vagueness, my voices, my silent parents with their flickering fingers. You think: I could go to the store, I could wear something low-cut, provocative, magnetic. Men would zoom towards me, summoned, between the crates of oranges and grapefruits, weaving between grains and cleaning fluids and leaving children and wives in aisles 6, 12, 17, towards my radiating, casually voluptuous body. I would pick up an apple, breath on it, bat my eyes.

Nobody wants you, I say, watching as your back stiffens with pain. When we met, you were sitting alone on a park bench. Not even in a bar, nursing a beer, swathed in darkness with gashes of light on your face, moaning about a man, or a woman, or something. No, it was just you, on a creaky park bench, entombed in a dilapidated green parka, looking wan. There were shadows under your eyes, your nose, your lips; perhaps there was a tree overhead. There was foliage underfoot, red and yellow, my favorite colors. I thought to myself: she’s placed herself in a Hell, the flames burning steadily in their leafy shape. You would call it purgatory, noticing the tiny cracks in the veins of the leaves, the brown creeping along their edges; you would find hope in temporality. When we met, I would have wished for you that it was purgatory, that it too would pass. Now I hope that it was Hell.