by Alina Marks

Created on: February 14, 2009

Sunday

It was another Sunday
not unlike the Sunday's that had began
to stack themselves
one after another
into a pile of drawn out weeks
and months
of uptight silence.

Saturday night was still
looming over me
like an overcast morning,
one of those mornings
where the fog thickens
in a refusal to burn off.

I spent the day waiting
for the right time to tell you
that it was never quite right.

I carefully gathered the right words
and the right pieces of our relationship
into a collection
of premeditated phrases that would explain
why everything was wrong.

My speech
was immediately impaired.
The evening sun
bounced off a glass building
adjacent to our living room window
when you said the world
was covered in a shadow.
The orange light
seeped into the cracks and space
between us. It was cold. Any second now
I was going to wake up.
The minutes turned into hours.
Time became a sealed fragment of seven years.
You went to sleep out of pure exhaustion
and I never did wake up.

It is quiet now. I lie down next to you
and feel the distance between us
even though you are inches away.
I can see my words
etched into your expression. I want
to pull them back to my side of the bed
because they are a coiled rope
bundled up inside of you
and they are heavy.

One by one,
hand over hand,
I want to pull the sentences
back in through my breaths
until they are safely heaped and hidden
inside of me.

You frown and mumble
in an incomprehensible Russian tongue
about human suffering
and later,
I dream of a tar-black thread,
about death
sewn into the seams of my wedding dress.
You wake up and ask me about coincidence,

about first kisses and open books in kindergarten,
about black and white wings on Halloween,
about names.
You want to know

why we dream the same dreams
and before your lips curve
into the beginning of these words,
I envision a child
with long black hair and blue eyes
holding your hand
in a nebulous light.

I mutter the words,
"I don't know"
through a flood of fear and doubt
as the image of our tiny, cracker jack box apartment
and tossing
a year's worth of antidepressants
in the garbage when you moved in for the first time
play in my mind like a silent film.

You tell me of our future
in a paper cigar ring
after a day
tucked between
towering blades of grass
on an island by the airport
and ask,
"why?"

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