They met in the ring: She took advantage of his smokers’ lungs, while, later, he took advantage of her heart, or frontal lobe, or whatever organ provides support in the lounge of Smokers Anonymous, holding her arm as she sifted through magazines, finding yet another short story about divorce- fallout from the explosion of the nuclear family still lingering in 2014 (radioactive letters glow in the dark). She took advantage of his ability to multitask in the grocery store, to calculate the cost difference between buying a bunch of those individual yogourt containers or the big one, juggling several factors such as the very real implications of yogourt-water-residue (more likely to accumulate in the bulk container) or how you lost the element of surprise in trying different flavours, considering a total yogourt sum of one thousand milliliters, the bulk size means a week of vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla: Less risk, sure, should you not be a fan of trying the Excruciating Espresso, or Inspiring Kiwi: Vanilla becoming this symbol of constancy in your life, the flavour you can depend on to just be there, you know, like the friendly hairdresser who listens to you every two months- anything to prepare yourself for the unpredictable amazingness or awfulness of what happens after breakfast. He took advantage of her ability to speak Spanish when travelling on those well-kind-of-sketchy-white-people-trips to a country where, in 2000, a company from their country sponsored a genocide in order to ensure their grasp on the international banana market, making them feel strange to be in that space but she nevertheless got the directions to shade when it was hot and he had drunk too much beer and Coca-Cola from glass bottles. She relied on his ability to fold laundry; he took advantage of her determination in a canoe, how she dunked the head deep and pulled it back with purpose, as though trying to glide from a freshwater shark, determined to get the generic box of macaroni roasting in the stone-walled fire-pit. She took advantage of the times she caught him with his hands behind his head, taking a break to watch her paddle, exaggerating a fit to justify throwing him in the cold and green water of the flat lake.
