And Then

When he smiles, it is like a baby not yet in control of involuntary muscle spasms and still everyone around it coos and claps in delight. They do not coo over smiling six-year-olds who do not mean it. When I tell him truths he does not like to hear he hits me, soft at first across the chest, as if to test my reaction, hard later but noncommittally now, knowing I will not change the Universe to suit him. On the long train ride home he takes my hand and runs it across his face, as if trying to make our bodies one and my movements his, he buries himself in my lap and wants only to sleep. How life is cruel in its whims. Across the ocean, a woman whose blood runs in my veins, whose small body my own mother once held as hers, watches her belly grow, wonders at life. She says I haven't dreamed yet, and you know what she's telling you. She says One day at a time and you remember suddenly how many years are tied between you, how many stories. Does it not ache to be keept so far apart? One night I sat in a dark bar just like this one and whispered I love you, but only under my breath, only so you could not hear it and anyway that is years ago now, you are miles away and everything looks different from here. Some days I'd give anything to have you in that bar again, how simple our desires become in relativity. Anyway the point is today was the first day of fall and it was a hundred degrees so what do we really know of life? All we can do is put one foot in front of the other.

All we can do is live it.