After

After your TV disappears and the dusty space lectures you, you read an article called “How to be alone” and think I cannot do that, I like being kissed too much.

And you will cry the sobs of someone driven toward madness, delivered to emptiness.

And you will laugh the sound of someone driven toward madness, delivered to emptiness.

And people who you thought loved you will suddenly stop loving you, without provocation or conversation.

And you will tell people: We are getting a divorce and think, those words are words of someone older, someone braver, someone assured, someone else.

And there will be coffee dates with tall men who talk about hypnosis and spinal manipulation and use words like ellipsis and tell you about the long walk home from catholic school. In the snow.

And there will be dates in bars at times when you used to be sleeping, where an invisible deejay plays a Barry White song and lucid girls with short-shorts play pool and laugh and they are ten years younger but seem to have the answer to the question “What kind of love is this your givin me?” in the way they flip their long hair.

And people will tell you how much weight you’ve lost, how beautiful you look. How skinny you are, how you need to eat more.

And you will sleep on your side of the bed, sleep in the middle of the bed, sleep on the couch, sleep in the daytime, not sleep at all. You will buy a new bed.

And you will take off your wedding ring and look at the pale circle on that weak finger and consider that the circle is like the rings on a tree, small grooves for every year you grew together, more towards the light and then grew apart at the tops, like branches each trying to fight for space in the sky.

And you will feel like love will never come to you again, that it must not know where you live anymore until you hear its footstep on your front porch and its “shave and a haircut, two bits” on your heavy wooden door.

And you will hesitate before you open, but you will open it.

(of course you will)