And It Looked Like Love

It's been 2 minutes now that you've been nestled in line at the grocery store between a grandmother and her grandson and a huddle of hyperactive too-cool-for-school teenagers. Your partner is right beside you, it's getting close to 8 pm, you've still got on a sweaty pair of shorts and your hair is up after the gym. The grocery run was the product of a "do-we-have-this-at-home-I-don't-remember-ok-we-should-get-it-then" conversation in the car and you're holding the tomato juice that you're pretty sure you-do-have-at-home. You're now just ready to fly home, open up the bed covers, and sink into the mattress like butter on toast.

Any second now...you will...soon...

Ahead of the line, the grandma pushes an item to the cashier, her grandson helps her move another item from the cart onto the conveyor belt, the grandma arranges them, the high school boy behind you is snickering at a TikTok video, the grandmother moves another item, the scanner reliably sounds with each new addition to the converyor belt, beep-beep-beep...

You look at your partner.

His eyes are not on the grandma or the grandson or the pack of high schoolers.

His eyes are centered on the cashier and they're doing double duty on her face for longer than usual.

He looks away quickly.

Your chest swells and your fingers become prickly.

Your throat closes and you feel a tightness of breath in the same way you feel when you're swimming front crawl and you've been in the water for too long and you can't turn your head fast enough to taste oxygen.

You can't look at him or her but you can't look away, either.

You start to look at her for a split second too long, staring at her hair, eyes, lips, trying to see what he's seeing. Imagining...his thoughts... Your mind has started to measure the discrepancies between you and her: it's the eye colour that he likes, or maybe the almond shape (mine are too small), or it's her height (she's tiny, I'm a gargantuan wildebeest next to her petite frame), or maybe it's her strawberry hair colour.

Next, your brain goes into fight or flight: do you give your partner the cold shoulder, do you run from your emotions, or do you pay for your purchase and fight in the parking lot, tell him how hurt you feel in the car, on the way back to your bed where you were planning on sinkholing into cushiony oblivion, or...

Or should you hold it all in, leave the pressured corkscrew on, and be better than the past because you know you're paranoid and you want to spare him and you want to protect him from potential emotional abuse and you want to make sure he doesn't get tired of it so that you don't ruin a good thing and so that he doesn't run away... run away... bolt fast and far and away from the clenched muscles and sharp pains and brimming eyes... farther and farther away from it...

Because her eyes are not yours and her lips are not yours and her small, short body is not yours, and her smile is not yours, and she is not you and you are just you and...

That warm, soft, cushiony space at home is calling to you because now, especially now, you are tired.

And maybe you're just always tired. Maybe from this?

Of vigilantly watching eyes, lips, hair, bodies, height, size, facial symmetry, hip size, butts, teeth, walks, waists, fingers, hands, toes, knees, ankles for some idea of why you're not enough.

Of why you'll never be all that exists in his world.

But what's the point of love if it's not grand and marvelous and exclusive and completely all-consuming like those movies like those books like those...

And you've now paid, walked out into the parking lot, your sweaty hands holding the bag of tomato juice. You're planning on making a pasta dish at home, thinking about the spices you should add. Maybe cumin? Maybe thyme? A bit of pepper and salt, naturally. A bit of paprika, potentially.

And you get in the car, gripping the door handle. And you drive off onto the main road. And you've made the pasta and ate it, and you approach your cushiony bed and mattress.

And now your mind is fluttering along on a calmer, safer sea, and you seem to see that grandson helping his grandmother put her grocery items on the conveyor belt one by one.

And you think that it looked like love.