Love, Lose, And Repeat

Red Shadow

Before I knew love, I knew how to get my parents going. I knew how many shots of jager got me tipsy before it started showing. When I was too lazy to get up, if papers were blown by wild windows, I learned there is a way to pick up almost anything between tips of painted toes. I knew I would always kill spider plants, and that I had concaved feet that would never learn to dance. I also knew I was sixteen--bruised by love's attention span that spit on me like I was less than nobody. I learned I would shine love's shoes or even let love win at chess. I just wanted him to let me slip him on like a an old-age attic dress.

In college, I thought love would be a mean drunk; that he would pray to concerts like it was his church, he would slip on band tee shirts, and wear piercings he swore didn't hurt. I thought when I met love, he would feel like a pitch to a dunk tank, and sitting inside I would take a sloping ride into freezing water and it wouldn't matter more than a slow sigh, because I thought love would always keep me dry.

I used to think love hurt like a bandaid, not the bruise under it, but the bandaid--cold and plastic. When it was torn, the soft spot, brown and purple, was left cold and vulnerable. I thought I was in control of love, that if I held him tight enough, I could convince love to stay sticky and to wait.

I thought love would taste like candy canes and take me on my very first date. I thought love would roller skate and that I would know love when I saw love and he would smell like fire. I learned how to hold love the same way my hands learned how to hold apples. My instinct folded when it tried to teach me how to behave because I was young And let love turn me into its slave.

I learned love liked to change form, like a lizard--to shed shadows, like a snake's skin. Love learned to grow around me like one-half of two intertwined trees. Love lost its hairline, but gained eye wrinkles. He smells like my father now, pipe tobacco and maple. Expectations for love are left like muffled gas under car engines to evaporate into air.

I want love to buy my favorite perfume and help me with my kids--maybe he'll play violin on weekends. He will caress my neck with sensitive hands that I haven't felt since my second marriage. I want love to have me exorcized, because I will be calling out to god in the bedroom, but love comes quiet now.

He has gray hair, soft skin. He comes from a generation where crying in public isn't in their constitution. He hides in our garage, puts on "George Jones: Live at Mirage" and turns on his table saw. He shuts the door--so no one can hear him anymore.

Maybe love is just a revolving door of nods, and winks, and smiles or maybe its a cabinet full of last name comma first-name files. Records, locked and secret, are blown open when the right breeze grows to tickle them.
They aren't in order, its a cluttered collection of things I lost, littered like gum wrappers on a winding, high-speed, heading to 70, highway.  They are names I don't want to say, and songs I  don't want to hear. They are places that I let get in my way, and a line-up of letters, like a shopping list, ready to say.

Love is a sneeze. It tickles like Elmo. It breaths in hard and heavy just to heave out. What's left is a tingle, but nothing to hold. Go outside, smell again. Open up to orchids, gossip with rose petals, let dander dangle in nostrils, and another sneeze will come.

I know my hands can hush babies to sleep. I can find the ripe melon by hearing inside sloshing sounds. I know I wished I learned to tango and that I cried when my father died and I got his green Durango.  I know I will always forget to water spider plants and I can no longer squeeze into size ten pants.

I learned I will still go back to love the next time he gives me the chance, because that's the one thing I really know about love--that love is always ready for our spotlight dance.