April 24, 2012
Brooklyn, NY
I don’t really know how it happens but we are fighting in our bedroom and the mirror from the wall ended up on our bed somehow? And then it broke and shards and pieces got all over the sheets, and we were wrestling in it, wrestling for the bracelet she had given him but also for control and neither one of us could find any. It ends with him on top of me because he is bigger and stronger. We are breathing hard, our hearts pounding, and the slivers of glass dig into our skin. His face is in front of mine, his big hands on my shoulders, and I hate it that he has won. So I spit in his face.
Later, I see that me spitting is the demarcating line between what was before and the end of our relationship. But at the time it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.
He gets off me, and is going out the door, and I am chasing him, but his lead is too much and I am not wearing shoes, and I have no idea where he went. Probably to one of the bars a few blocks away, but my hair is a mess and I can still feel glass in me and I am too ashamed to be in public and searching for him like a jilted woman. So I go back home.
Except besides not having shoes, I also don’t have keys or a cell phone and I can’t get back into the apartment. I sit on the stoop and although it’s a warm night it is still April and it is cold and my feet are cold and I realize that my life with him is going to end now, that one of us will have to move out, that it will probably be me, that he won’t be in my life anymore, that I am alone, that I am ugly, that we just yelled and broke things and wrestled in shattered glass on our bed, that I spat in his face, and my feet are cold, and it is cold, and I am locked out, and the world is spinning, and I am worried I am dying and the edges of things grow dizzy and black.
But then a raccoon is crawling up the fence. There is no wilderness anywhere near us, and I’ve never seen wildlife around here before, and seeing this raccoon here feels like something meaningful. It is perched at the top, looking at me, deciding if I am a threat, weighing its choices. We regard each other for a while. Then it hops my side of the fence and walks slowly down the street, in the direction of where the person who is now my ex-boyfriend has gone, and I can breathe, and things are terrible and ugly and I am still ashamed but I also know things will be OK without him.