Interstate
I enjoy the easy cruelty of dismissing our relationship by saying I experimented with girls in college
Strictly speaking, it’s not true —there was only one girl, as well you know
and the experiment was a long and sustained one.
Experimented lays waste groceries bought and hair stroked on a bathroom floor in the midst of a migraine
Experimented has precious little to say about sitting in your grandmother’s kitchen
picking leaves out of a colander of fresh blueberries.
I sat there with you within wood-panelled walls while a woman out of Little House on the Prairie asked
what was the last thing you read? and filled a large Ziploc bag with freshly popped corn
We would eat it, you and I, handful by heaping salty handful, on the long drive back
Experimented doesn’t have room for the arguments I had with my mother
before I got on the Amtrak train to Kansas City.
It doesn’t contain the hurt in her clenched jaw that,
of the three weeks I’d be home between January and August,
I chose to spend four days with your family.
What experimented easily encapsulates is that it all happened between the ages of 18 and 22
and it doesn’t happen anymore.
It’s difficult to write about without sounding nostalgic for what I no longer miss.
On the other hand, it would be too easy and too hack to bitterly trace the throughlines
of our eventual and extreme unhappiness
back to its earliest embryo.
To do so would wilfully ignore the assignment for a writing class I’m taking
(my second without you)
which is to describe a period of contentment.
Someone who knows about you
(and what a cruel way to describe and dismiss him — the equal and opposite of experimented)
asked shyly, into my shoulder,
is it different being with a lad.
The good and the bad came rushing back to me,
but I had very little desire to puncture our own period of contentment.
His and mine, I mean.
I had very little desire to trot out my liberal arts degree
and apply gender theory to the differences between
putting his dinner in front of him
and jumping out of bed on a winter morning to buy your favourite iced tea.
Sweet tea, globes of ice swilling in the plastic cup
and those egg and cheese breakfast sandwiches we stopped eating
when your best friend watched a documentary and we all went vegan.
I hated your best friend for reasons that had nothing to do with liking a splash of milk in my own tea
Yes it’s different, I could have said. I buy real milk when you come over.
It’s hard to evoke a time of peace and simple satisfaction, I’m finding,
without thinking about food
and without reducing the pair of you
to beverage preferences based on your demographic profiles.
What I miss, I could have said
at the grave risk of hurting feelings I have come to care about more than my own
is the talking. The processing.
It’s a stereotype about lesbian relationships, but a true one
that everything is over-analysed, talked through, parsed into oblivion.
You can imagine how funny and maddening and sad
I find it to be curled up with someone and say so how was your day
and get nothing but ah grand.
You and I never stopped talking.
On lolling, sprawling weekend mornings we talked in bed until hunger loped in
I thought of nothing but caffeine and
you languidly brushed your long red hair.
Impatient, I was under the humiliating impression I’d have a lifetime to watch you do that
I thought I’d always be able to inhale the scent of your dry shampoo
on the days between uses of the salon-grade hair products standing, stout sentinels, in our shower.
Later we’d drink Barry’s tea, ounces and ounces of it, from big-bellied mugs.
We’d sit across the table from each other, sunlight streaming through the blinds
warming our hands around the kiln-kissed ceramic.
We talked about what we were writing I’m not sure where it’s going can I send you a few pages
and whether a mutual friend had indeed been acting weird the night before exactly! see I noticed that too
and the future when we have a real kitchen.
In my mind it was always autumn, but that’s just because we were students.
I was never as happy as driving across the Midwestern plains with you, big book of CDs on my lap
from Illinois to New York, from Kansas to Illinois.
Your steadfast hands on the steering wheel, cloudless blue and miles of flat, fertile land ahead of us.
Across Colorado, doubts starting to creep in
mountain ranges and red rocks, llama farms and the Air Force Academy
evangelical megachurches that upset me the way
the little box of rosary beads on my desk upset you.
Even at our most content, you had no patience for my free-flowing tears and sentimentality
Comparisons could be made to those arid plains
You’re not writing verses to me and if you are they aren’t like this — all italics and religious imagery and fussy details.
But I read a poem about being in love in mid-America and it made me think of you.
Annie James is a writer living in Galway. Her work has been published in ROPES Literary Journal and short-listed for the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year.
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