we’d just gotten married. we were getting ready for a masquerade, the two of us dressed in black. my hair was curled, glitter glowed on my skin. we put on our masks…silver for you, jeweled for me and you spun me around the kitchen floor under the fluorescent lights. we drove there in your truck, your jacket wrapped tightly around my shoulders. You held my hand when we walked through the door, found a table in a dark corner. we watched the people in their masks, watched them dance, watched them drink, watched them laugh, watched them talk in hushed voices. A magician came to our table, pulled silken scarves and balls of red foam out of our hands where there weren’t before. We drank our whiskey in cut crystal glasses, smiled while flashbulbs exploded in front of our eyes. My ring cast prisms on the darkened ceiling, yours caught the light as you shook the hands of strangers. I was yours, wound through your heart, around your arm, your star struck lover in a mask of diamonds, a mask of jewels.

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A few years ago Alex shared a house with Rob and Jeremy. I kind of lived there too. I got off work really late one night and I was pulling up in their driveway and I thought a kitten ran under my car. I wasn’t that concerned because it was a cat…but I parked and crawled under anyway and found a little monster and didn’t know what to do so I ran inside and got Alex. He didn’t believe me. When we went back outside it was sitting up on it’s hind legs waiting for us very patiently, twitching his little nose.  We invited it in, stared at it for a minute, and it ran straight into the house. We chased it around and the dogs went crazy and when Alex finally found it, he picked it up and cuddled with it. I googled it. It was a woodchuck. We named him Chuck (clever) and made him a little place to live. We neglected to fill Rob in on any of this. The next day while we were gone, Rob found Chuck in the dryer (still very much alive) …..he didn’t like Chuck. So he threw him in a pillowcase and dropped him off at the vet’s office. He was kind of proud of himself until he realized he had kidnapped and then abandoned my new pet.

So then Alex dug a koi pond. We bought a bunch of little fishies. I named mine Geisha. She committed suicide within 24 hours.

I didn’t have any more pets that summer.

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On our first day together, we planned on going to the beach. We didn’t. Instead he thought it was crucial in the first 24 hours of our relationship, right at that very moment, for me to watch Donny Darko with him, to let me inside his mind and see if I could survive it. He held his arms around me and rested his head on my shoulder. He whispered in my ear that he never could figure out what the numbers on his arm meant. I told him it was the countdown, the time left until the end days. His stared at me and his eyes cleared.

“what would I do without you?”

that was the last thing I heard him say before I fell asleep with his arms wrapped tightly around me, the ones that never let go.

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