An Inherent Softness

There is nothing beautiful here, not in the infinity that exists between the moments of opening one’s eyes and being fully awake. It is all awkward twitches, adjustments of blankets, measured breaths so as to not wake up the sleeping form on the other half of the bed, only to realize they haven’t been here in days (weeks?) and you are holding in air for no one but your own inflated self-worth. Maybe it was an early workday, or the luxury of forgetting this particular type of fresh couple intimacy.

Moments feel like forever when they weigh as much as a child. There might as well be a toddler strapped to her chest as she tries to force herself up out of bed, rip off the sheet, give notice to the bug trapped in a weird dance with the fan inside her air conditioner that she is about to disrupt his wiggling for the day. Probably should have pulled that out of the window before now, before the cold air could find a weakness in the cracks and make itself at home in her pillowcase. Still, she ignores that, thinks for another night it’ll be okay. The bug is still alive somehow, and so is she, and that is good enough. Sign enough of the warmth still to come. When he mentions it later as he presses the power button for the chill, yet scolds her for her cold feet, will she have a momentary twinge of regret again? If it really bothered him that badly, he would take it out himself.

What is living but a quest for some unattainable youth? Being young is wasted on those who are living it. The twenty-four grey hairs that have been gearing up to have a new family member arrive any day now would tell her it is just a thought process, but she knows better and she looks at them every day with more indifference than the last. What does it matter that she has the marks of a lifetime of laughter beside her eyes, or that deep scowl of her mother’s etched pretty permanently right between her brows? She was sixteen, shaking with nervous laughter when she found her first grey little friend. Everyone knows you pluck one and three more come to its funeral so she left it right where it was and quickly changed the part in her hair to mask it. Everyone loved the new look, crisis averted. Women grow older, men get to age. Women curl into wrinkles, disappear into the void that is “30+” and have at least one or two weirdly stained fingertips that announce to anyone who will listen that she has dyed her hair recently. Men get salt and peppered; served on a cast iron skillet, seared to absolute perfection.

The wetness between her legs she finds now, most frequently within these eternities, is unmistakably urine that has leaked out in her sleep, not any hot desire for another human being. The first time she noticed it she was ashamed, blushed hot red fireworks onto the apples of her cheeks, and dashed off to the bathroom to clean up. Now sometimes she does not bother, doesn’t care, and she lets him enter her from behind under the guise of being just as excited for him as he is for her. This is almost never the case. She hasn’t thought about anyone like that in too long. He hasn’t noticed, but they have always only been intimate a few times a month, how could he recognize anything like regularity in that particular type of warmth?

She used to cringe thinking about hot morning breath, slip out of bed and brush her teeth or at least use mouthwash if she was staying at his place. Now they lie in their shared bed with their limbs tangled, glamourization neutralized in the hot, stale kiss she has grown both used to and bored with. Out of love, no, but out of lust, she has fallen. She remembers being 25, pressed up against a refrigerator in someone’s basement while some woman she barely knew tugged at her breast under her shirt, begging for hardened nipples and the softest moans. She misses this for just a blink of an eye, yawns, finally sits up. The knot in her thigh is likely nothing, but she gives it the space to be a tumor or a blood clot if need be. Dramatics aren’t really her thing, but it’s worth the millisecond of worry if she can think about herself at this moment.

Stretching doesn’t feel nearly as good as it did when she was seven, still growing, limbs all over the place. Now her muscles are much more sedentary. She walks for at least thirty minutes every day, dances while she cooks or cleans, but other than that she is motionless. The evidence of this boring everyday pools into her lap, a soft little belly where a flat stomach used to reside. She doesn’t care about it but does sometimes wish she didn’t see her mother so clearly in herself like this. There is an abrasive unevenness in her slippers- she stumbled down the steps once and there was a twist in the interior that she can’t seem to straighten out even now, so she settles for the annoyance that is the reminder every morning when she slides them back on. Just like the bug, it is evidence that somehow there is another day on the way. Thinking of the bug, she crosses the room and clicks the air conditioner off.

In the bathroom, she flicks on the light out of nighttime habit and then quickly shuts it off. The electric bill was way too expensive last month to be doing this in anything but the morning sun spilling in from inside her shower. When they first moved here, she loved the hot afternoon sunshine on her tits as she bathed, but then a neighbor suggested they install a curtain over the window and she just gets to open it in the morning to stab at her mouth. She fishes through her bathroom bag to find her dentist tools ($5 on clearance at KMart, just before they closed it down for good) and aggressively scrapes at the back of her teeth. When she spits there is just a little blood, and she gingerly sucks at that same ugly spot where the metal tip tends to nick her gums. Halfway through her routine flossing, tools tucked away in favor of the string between her fingers, she hears pots and pans in the kitchen, banging, a hum from the song she knows he is singing, he is always singing.

She blinks her eyes and the infinity is gone.