MELODRAMA by Megan Giddings

Me: a sentient bag of bricks left next to a screen door, easy to burgle. 

Me: an oversized crow who won't shut up, whom people always assume is about to have a massive poopsplosion. 

Me: a person who uses whom and is resentful of the fact I always have to wonder if I’m using it correctly.

You: a cloud, always on, shifting between lavender, magenta, tiger. 

You: the kind of person whom everyone says looks like that one celebrity.

You: the person who left me eight months six days and several hours ago. 

Our house: overgrown with back-porch ivy in a way that I always said meant fairy tale and you said meant thousands of dollars in home repair. 

Our house: mostly quiet in the evenings because you were on your phone “doing work,” while I stayed busy.

Me: becoming the diamond genius of first-person shooters, the lieutenant of loved ones’ love lives.

Our house: where you were always saying I’d promised you a baby.

My body: filled with fibroids that I long to pull and slice open like owl pellets. 

My fibroids: full of bones and skulls and rocks and cedar scraps and something small and bright shining back at me, longing for me to dissect them and write a lab report; everything my body says is a clue rather than a statement. 

My body’s deep abiding mysteries: when I was a teenager and the world was always handing me little cups of shame, I would go to the bathroom late and shed clothes in moonlight, hating how its light dulled my skin from brown to yellow, but loving the way my breasts were their own full reflections in the mirror. 

My body: struggling in your absence to reintroduce itself to me.

You: already involved with someone who isn't worth commenting on because the only thing describing them would say about our current melodrama is that you are willing to be bored.

You: texting me late at night to ask tender things about the house like have I replaced the furnace filters, have I watered the tomatoes, have I taken care of the ivy yet?

You: coming over tonight.

Me: trying to decide whether we fight or fuck or do both and what the order should be if we are going to do both.

If we do both: your preference was always to fight then fuck and mine was to fuck, fight, then hope that the fight would lead to a second time and maybe if you were inside me, it would become clear you loved me enough to finally pull my hair like you meant it.

Me: petty enough to buy an arrangement of dark pink roses that look like Kerry Washington’s mouth and place it on the kitchen table in a way that says Sure, yeah, I am desired.

Me, being desired: two dates with a nice man who has not kissed me yet but instead gives me meaningful hugs; one makeout session with C, her mouth just as soft as I thought it would be. 

You: have some things you want to talk about. 

Us: pushed toward marriage by the momentum of the relief that came with finally, after nineteen years, believing we’d paved over all the cracks between us. 

Our home: always smelled like popcorn and on the best days filled with light and wall of sound songs, your hands on my arms and legs and me reaching for you without thinking and sometimes, even the wind was saying this is special.

Inside me: a long manifesto that speaks to how everything in this life has to be fallow sometimes. 

You: coming in to take my hands and tell me your new girlfriend is pregnant.

Us: crying, and then, of course, kissing. 

Your hands: gently on my throat. 

The bedroom where I now sleep alone: we don’t quite make it there.

Me: cruelly willing my body to be as rude and complicated and possible.

Me: ready now to choose to switch all the lights on and welcome a baby into the creaky studio apartment of my uterus.

You: “I missed this.”

Me: avoiding your eyes, half with you; half not.