Laborer and Hostess

I was a laborer and she was a hostess. We would stare passionately at one another. Some would say we were just as in love with the lower-class life we were living together. We were poor but you would not expect it by the way we carried ourselves. We never pronounced our love to the world, because as far as we were concerned, we were the only ones living on it. Our mornings were rehearsals of when we would see each other in the evenings; what I would say to her when I saw her, and of the things we would do. We seldom had fun, and it was usually after a fight, but when we fought it was not because we were learning more about each other, but because we were remembering one thing or another we had always instinctively known about each other's behavior. We reminisced at times about how the voices in your head that judge one thing or something else tends to relax with age, although we weren't that old. She made the nights seem quieter, and the stars somewhat brighter, and colors had their way of shimmering with a higher gloss when she was around. We had no friends we entertained. No family either one of us could recall. One day, after work she scolded me about a thought she had. She told me people aren't usually as lonely as we are, and she was convinced other people share their worlds with one another. “What we are doing isn't normal”. I told her we weren't normal people. We shared a soul, or a brain, or our thoughts. Whatever we shared - other people couldn't possibly understand. She told me I was right, perhaps. Sometimes I had felt she didn’t truly feel the same way as me. To me, she was everything in my world. She was a metaphor all around me - in the cracks of pavement growing weeds in our neighborhood, in the loud drunks yelling beneath the twilight, in the sounds of emergency sirens wailing, in the art gently laid on the canvas walls. I brought it up to her one time, that I was concerned about her true feelings for me. She told me she thought that about me from time to time as well. “So, we are truly in love then? Not one thing has even gotten in between us?” “Yes”.

Time kept going on, like a righteous passage bestowed upon us. It was as if we already knew our destination, and waited for it with little expectation. And some years later, I looked at her with the same fire, hunger, insatiable eloquence as the very first day I had fallen in love, and with not a shred of doubt in my tame mind. Then we fell asleep together, and it felt as though it was the first time. We watched the world go around us, we held each other up, we occasionally tore each other down too. Our life was like a blank canvas, our life was like smoke on the water, our life was like the silence of the nighttime drenched in a fake type of purity. It reminded me of a cheap modern home, and slowly and slowly I realized these things were the essence of our painful childhoods. They were abandonment and traumas and misfortunes. We had been holding onto one another to rescue one another and now there was nothing to rescue one another from, and so we had been going through phases of a type of materialism not a type of love. A type of materialism I mean, as our love was not pure but it was an idea, it was a hope that we could smile confidently and say we were not a half but one whole. And that was the only reason, just to say that. Not because of infuriating, passionate, disassociated, fiery, torturous love.

And so she left.