Milk, White, Dark

I : Love Won’t Tear Us Apart. If It Did, It Would Save Me a Lot of Calls to Customer Service.

There are days filled with low-level panic and pervasive despair. I transverse the hours via scurry. I'm an existential Indiana Jones, running across the rotting boards of my old life, praying that I reach terra firma before they crumble out from under me. Getting my cell phone company to split our "family" plan into two separate lines is a Kafkaesque exercise in futility. The prospect of arranging every last vestige of my married life into two discrete piles is overwhelming. While sitting in the wreckage is depressing, simultaneously building and demolishing seems flat-out impossible. The Impending Ex and his girlfriend are buying new furniture. Every time I visit, there’s a new table, new decoration, new celebration of a new life. I go to IKEA and find myself unable to buy so much as a shelf, because something supported by wall anchors implies permanence and such a concept is unthinkable. So I wind up eating Swedish meatballs and staring at couples who've got a lot more faith in themselves and in particle board than I ever remember having. There are days like that.

II : Love is a Tower of Strength in Me

And then there are days like this.

My futon is an ideal landing place for stage falls. It's firm yet yielding, of moderate height and so ugly that its inadvertent destruction would fill me will IKEA-bound glee. When I'm feeling very happy and very dramatic, I'll take a face-first dive onto it. After crashing into the cushions, I press my face against the polyester velveteen and close my eyes. I pretend that I have the very essence of warmth and contentment pinned underneath me, and I can't get up, lest it die, disappear or flutter off into a shady corner. Instead, I let it melt against my skin, light up my bloodstream like fiber-optic cable, assimilate me into the vast cosmic repository of all that which is good.

I'm extraordinarily fortunate. My life is filled with a number of people who are wise, kind and compassionate; people who, to my amazement and delight, actually seem to like me. They feed me. They look out for me. They let me flop on their futons. We tickle each others' kids, share secrets embarrassing and profound. Being with them makes me like who I am. The cynicism and self-protective stance fall away. I am inundated with goodness; in turn, I try to disseminate as much of it as I can. Sans irony, sans defensiveness, I know what I'd like to be. An open door. An available lap. A safe haven of kindness, small gestures and esoteric cooking tips. When things are bad, scary or falling apart in the middle of the night, the first phone number which comes to mind.

On days like this, I am swept up in the arms of a momentarily-benevolent universe.

III : Love Is Bad For the Teeth of the Soul

For a limited time only (from thisverysecond until all that remains are desiccated petals and half-chewed caramels), and burning only a fraction of the karma which has so richly entitled me to do so, I intend to be an insufferable little bitch about it, I reserve the right to refuse any comfort, advice, platonic hugs, positive prognostication or radiant gems of staggering insight from anyone, anywhere, who spends these dim and icy days warmed by anything more personal than a massive gas bill, who hovers above the stretcher in a protective fog of hindsight and iodine fumes and murmurs, “I know how it feels”, who takes their coffee with the plentiful half-and-half of comfort and companionship rather than the self-loathing Sweet ‘n Low of really, truly wanting to be able to fulfill all of one’s own needs, and failing to do so time and again, and there is no quantity of Altoids large enough to eradicate that particular taste, there is no peanut butter-filled heart succulent enough to negate the fact that it is charity candy, and there is most certainly no one whose opinion I’d like unless they, like I, spent the past month sleeping on the couch without being entirely sure why, and finally, after moving the bed into a snug corner on a whim, realized that it was the confinement, that a sleeping area with walls and borders felt better, and wondered why that might be, and then, curled up tightly, a serif comma printed on a queen-sized mattress, realized: oh, yeah. Right.