We had woken up buried one morning. Wedged in between the satin lining of all those rhythms and rhymes you never made a dent in with all your goddamned weeknight meetings, home games, rehearsals, one-beer drawn out anecdotes and that composed way you have of spreading, splicing and shredding your self into every last centimeter. You calculate everything, every inch and every measure to maximize, prioritize and optimize your life, but somehow you missed the chapter on your casket cohort, and here I am so together with myself and so alone with you, waiting and anticipating the arrival in your multiplication tables to the sum of my existence. And yet, at any rate, we rehearsed this scene too: a heavy, oily, sweaty evening made multi-dimensional by that pinched way you raise your eye brows, gloss over, wipe down, suggest and deny all at the same time.

I think about the number three. Three, three, three. Wasn’t there some religious, holier-than-thou sacred tone to that number? The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are presiding over our funeral. However, dear, I am sure that I will be attending a banquet at the table of our most Holy, while you, darling, you will be the crumpled up paper bag rip out of a calling card in Satan’s rolodex; simply based on the fact that I am here now making my final amends, can actually recall some of that biblical bullshit compliments of dad, and that while I am a thoughtful person you are sleeping probably having calculated sex with one of the wonderful women you work with who serve a side of flesh along with moderately priced, microwaved cuisine at a franchised restaurant in a dive college town.

Three was the number of dates we went on before we had sex (thanks to the great Cosmopolitan “How to Snag a Guy and Keep him Snug” Generation), three was the number of times I faked it before you found out, three years of college, three break-ups, three make-ups, dreams of three little kids that hopefully looked like me instead of you, three months until we said those three words that make little girls dream of big white weddings, and Barbies falling in love with Kens, and now three seconds it would take me to tell you I want to be through with you, am repulsed by you and am in love with another Ken.

You lay there, completely secure and unassuming, like Kevin in Home Alone before he realizes that his house is the target of a war waged by two sinister burglars. But this time there would be no elaborate faux-house parties with cardboard Michael Jordans tied to the top of toy trains to divert attention and no Joe Pesci masterful acting to save you or this two star movie we had staged over and over again until the dialogue lost all meaning. You are not a Browning Poem dearest; you gain no extra meaning from reading between the lines on your face caused from the souvenir skin damage you brought home for me from spring break. The least you could have done was get me a corresponding novelty t-shirt with a witty slogan like, “My Boyfriend went away to Jamaica to get high and all I got was this crappy, ill made, paper-based cotton t-shirt…but hopefully he got syphilis or skin cancer.” I am like a sieve for names, dates, faces, dearest, but damn it, I have never forgotten a gift you have ever given me or an adjective you ever qualified me with.

And now will that memory come to my aid? I should get up out of this pyre and go to the bar and do some vomit inducing shot to make me forget; to have a momentary, or if I’m lucky, permanent, lapse of recall of the way you smell after a shower and your hands, your laugh in response to my jokes, and your prince charming calculated way of saving the day when mom died, and shortly after when dad followed her lead. God- I am such a product of my genetics that whenever a fucking problem emerges, my family blood line opts satisfy everything and everyone by ending something with a funeral. Thanks Mom, not only did you die and leave me with salvation in the form of a 20 something male who can’t even text message adequately and talks to freshman on Facebook when he thinks I’m not looking, but you also instilled me the view that when the going gets rough there’s always a hearse right around the corner.

And now something else cropped up here, a fungus of sorts that neither of us calculated on and no, no prince charming salvation this time, no Barbie and Ken dream sequence to conjure up the slightest idea of hope based in plastic manufactured pink tinted dreams. Prince Charming never had to worry about this and neither did Ken. Ken didn’t have the right equipment, if memory serves correctly, to knock Barbie up and the great Prince didn’t have to worry about Sleeping Beauty sleeping with her best friend. I am sure, though, the fungus could be bulldozed over to build a Wal mart though, or maybe an airport to fly us to the Maury Povich show to find out just how much of a slut I am, or to find out the calculated solution of when your lover becomes your only family, until the point you conceive a family with them, only to want to conceal and reveal yourself to be in love with another. How long do I have before those three seconds of monologue putting an end to this stale paper mate of a eulogy become a necessity? How long until the guise of the Immaculate Conception falls to pieces and I have to go directly to jail without passing Go and without collecting my 200 fucking dollars severance fee for three faithful years with the same male?

I was a good girl I tell you. Like Laura Fucking Ingalls on that God Damn prairie show mom and I used to watch when she let me skip school after her chemo-treatments. Well not Laura, but that good one that went blind and stayed out of trouble. I think her name was Mary, Mary Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee and thee, and the three seconds to say what I need to say, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus, and the womb of a 21 year old college coed who sleeps around on her boyfriend, Holy Mary mother of God, Pray for us women who are sinners (well no, just pray for me, a whore), now the hour of this funeral and at the time of our bastard child’s birth do us part. Amen. And God if you can hear me, I blame you for freeing us from damnation and making us in your own image, because if catechism taught me anything, you loved mankind a lot to give up your own son for our sins. Well didn’t I do the same? Technically, I loved man too and in doing so gave myself up to sin with them? I am sure its all too much faith put in semantics, and I know I should be anti-semantic but I get I have a hard time pronouncing that phrase and it usually it ends up sounding like I am a supporter of the holocaust instead of someone against bullshit, confusing word choice.

But now your breathing heavily, qualifying the appropriate pauses and slowness to be sleep has subsided and I feel your presence beating down on me in your back-porch light way. And there’s dust on the panes of our windows preventing the moon light from getting in. Somehow the wind is stronger and it braces the warped casements and sends a serpent like stream of air around the room, tempting me to give you the apple I already took a bite from to rubber cement both of us into this gas furnace of a Lifetime movie plot line. You pull me close to you now, in that half calculated fake yawn, fake stretch, fake we’re perfectly comfortable and secure way that one does when they just wake up, but know, subconsciously that their lover has not reaped the benefits of a peaceful slumber. Your arms find their place around my waist and pull me into you, to fit perfectly together like two novels on a shelf that share their love, motifs and themes through the simple power of osmosis. Goddamnit- You nuzzle your nose into my hair and pull me even tighter, wrapping me up in the ever so fashionable straight jacket of your arms. But its last season’s style and the brand is discontinued and God I need a cigarette. Please God, deliver us from temptation and deliver me a flaming fucking bush of camel cigarettes. I know what is coming next, my eyes begin a barrage of burning, blinking and fluttering which turns into a full blown battle royal to get the irritation out - leaving streams and tear saturated streaks across the field of my cheek and ending buried in the pillow we bought together, in the bed we conceived in, the bed I transgressed in and now the bed I am assonating dreams in as if they were ducks donning bull’s-eyes at a carnival. You hold me tight and I feel your heart, and smell your comfortable Fuck you, the streams come stronger now and I am in a full blown Shakespearean tempest and you’re in love and I hate everything about Darwin and religion and you, and him, and this thing that is in me right now that’s based in love, but I guess the love for being selfish and wanting back the family that God took, and the love for oneself, isn’t the right kind of love to breed a child and I got it fucking wrong yet again.

“I love you,” you half yawn and half sigh in the beautiful notion of slumber as you pull me in for one last embrace- signifying your succumbing to more sleep, totally obviously to the fact the I am here crying, or that we’re on the altar of this funeral, or that I am here with you inside my body, but not in my heart, or that…

“Our windows are dusty and the wind is getting in.” 

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