Stretching

"Let me give you some advice," she spat out like an angry cat. Her face was streaked with tears, red eyes burning with malice and the fiery will to destroy anything she saw unfit.

We were at the tail end of another four hour fight. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other, uncomfortable, feet aching. I stared,unfeeling, into her watery swollen eyes, her nose was red, arms crossed, chest wet with her streaming tears. Her face was contorted with anger, her features bloated. Her plump skin softly folded over itself again and again, lazy epidermal origami.I struggled to recognize her, could this really be the person I had spent the last five years with? Is this my wife? How could it be? I loved her so dearly once, I knew that much, but looking at her now....

My mind was blank as I took in her body language, facial expressions, the angry,distraught, trembling of her lip as she sucked in air. I tilted my head, eyes empty. When we met she was barely surviving on the generosity of others. Working full tilt - long, difficult hours for a theater company, being paid in a stipend three or four months after the job was completed. She was living in the attic of a friends house, paying a little rent when she could, half starved but still able to buy cigarettes. She had maybe one meal a day but she was never without a pack of pall malls. I wrinkled my nose at the memory of the acrid smoke drifting into my nasal cavity, sinking into my hair and clothes. When I found out most of her diet came as care packages from her mother or the unwanted portions of food bank supplies left by the other tenants of the house I started feeding her. It was shit food, Taco Bell and Giant's pizza, but it was enough to keep full. Yet here she was, angry with our new roommate, my best friend who found himself without a home to go to after five and a half years of Navy service.

I had offered him our second bedroom without hesitation and at the time she was fine with it, until he moved in and she saw how close we were. "Why don't you go hang out with your fuckin boyfriend?" She'd hiss at me. She never tired of her clever quip when faced with my pleading eyes. "Why don't you put a band aid on that bleeding heart." This was her pattern though, every time I brought home feral kittens or abandoned puppies to foster she was supportive, loving, and involved until the novelty wore off. Then she was explosively angry, constantly fuming, hateful. "Get that fuckin rat out of my house." I bore the brunt of it as best I could, what was I going to do, put them back in the street? I always managed to get each lost soul I took in situated in a good home with caring hands and hearts.

When Leo came home we picked him up at the Sacramento airport. We stood under the massive red jack rabbit suspended from the ceiling and I stared at its expanse of geometric planes. A hundred thousand angles working toward a rounded edge. He slept at least 16 hours a day for the first week or so,but we found that if we let him be, he'd cook us spectacular dinners. But the night I knew we'd be stuck with each other until one of us died wasn't for about two weeks after he came home. She had work in the morning so she went to bed early. Leo and I ran down to Tower Liquor and bought Fireball, Jameson and Ginger Ale. We came home, made up a Mythbusters drinking game and got to work getting shitty. An hour in we were discussing sublimation and laughing at how drunk the other was. Through cheerfully teary eyes I looked up at him on the couch in a black wife beater, drunk and smiling, and thought to myself , "I'll keep this one." He looked down at me, his eyes lazily following the movement of his head, one eyelid slightly more drooped than the other, "whut?" He murmured. I laughed, "I like you man," he cocked his head "no homo." I added. He screwed up his face and laughed, swaying a little. When he smiles- really smiles- his genuine grin spreads over his face like a sunrise. Long playful talons of crows feet crease the corners under his hooded lids and he flashes those wolf teeth under the mischief sparkling in the vibrant honey-sienna of his eyes- "WELL I'M GLAD YOU FIND THIS SO FUNNY, DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT KIND OF-" I must have been smiling. I regained my composure, checked out again and watched the wet, grotesque rage gushing from her as she waxed her cross.

I think she could feel the distance in her own way, and her way of dealing with that was to be big and loud and scary, like the mock warnings of small prey animals. Perhaps she felt capable of closing the gap if she could just fill it full of sound and tears and hurt feelings. I wondered how she could be so sensitive, yet so callous, so desperate for love yet so neglectful in its care. Watching her like that the gears churning in my head slowed, time seemed to congeal around me as I reached the climax of my epiphany. Suddenly everything lay sprawled before me, the root of her anger, the reason behind her complacency, the solutions to all our problems, everything I had driven myself into the ground fighting for, digging and working and breaking my back in search of, pointless. None of it mattered anymore, because looking at her there was like seeing her for the first time. The last five years blew away in the blink of an eye, in the microsecond it took the synapse to fire that shot of her image all over my throbbing brain, beating against the walls of my pounding head. The deepest, warmest sensation permeated every pore of me, soaked into every nerve bundle, every cell, every fiber of my being. The tight ball of agony in my chest relaxed and I was filled with a warmth I hadn't known in years. Relief filled every bit of me, I was drowning in it, waiting for my second coming, for my new life. None of it mattered,

I did not love her anymore.

"Let me give you some advice," she spat at me,

"stop taking in strays."