Phenomenology

I feel like a sprouting potato, cutting out the eyes and getting into soup. 

Every night for the past two weeks, I’ve woken up at three a.m: 

I’m running from a tide of blood. A man is in my house, he’s got Jack Nicholson’s face, and he’s killing people, strangers, over and over again. I’m pushed from a balcony. I’m in the grocery store, and my mom won’t eat; she will not eat, and she won’t let me leave, not until dad comes home. She’s forgotten he’s dead. Waiting, and waiting, and I wake up. Sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes I’m filled with the dread that makes it hard to sleep. In general, it’s made me very tired. 

My boss thinks my apartment is haunted. Offers to bring incense. I’m starting to be convinced. 

I love my boyfriend, and Valentine’s day. Spending the night, we wake up individually, both at three am. I tell him about the tide of blood. I press my chest to his strong back, warm, and he laughs, and looks at his phone, and we go back to sleep. 

I don’t remember how we met. But coming back closer to it, we’re newer, and younger, and walking down the road, one of the ones full of car dealerships and miscellaneous shit. I find a book of poetry from a box on the curb. He takes us down a short steep trail, down to a little stream. I sit on the shore and read him bad poetry while he crouches in the mud, clay, sculpting me something: Canchito, my little pig. 

His spherical body is the size of a big bouncy ball, or a very small apple, filling up the center of a palm. He owns four knobbly legs, and pointy ears, and a knowing little idiot grin. Canchito lives on my desk, relocated from the center console of my old car. Down one leg from the crash, but still alive. 

My boyfriend and I don’t have a set anniversary, but it’s sometime soon. Sometime in these last two hazy weeks of February. It will be five years, we think. 

On Valentine’s day, we went to the mall. Bought coffee, and walked around. To the candy store, where I picked out a box of crickets, and durian pocky, and he buys some koi shaped gummies like a person who wants to enjoy themself. “I’m not better than a fish,” he says, about the crickets. And that makes it so easy. Who am I, to be better than a fish? They’re not bad, the crickets. No worse than an under seasoned vegetable, better than a capful of cold medicine. 

He makes it so easy, in general. 

The pocky was fucking awful though. 

I think I’m working through something in the back of my mind. They changed my work schedule. The night before valentines, I was officially accepted back into college, and will be starting in the fall. Outside, running in the evening, the trees have new little buds.

It’s good and it’s good and I’m happy, and it’s good. But change is like a careless hand, running through the silt in the back of my mind.

Going to work, and it’s still dark in the morning, and I open the door, and there’s a skunk on the patio. He looks at me and I look and him and he looks and me and I quickly run away to my car. Half a mile later, and I almost hit a deer. Halfway through the commute, and it starts snowing. Heavy flakes, the kind with a body and a presence. Fast enough to make me motion sick. Like the world is stirring up to match, with the back of my mind.

And I don’t know. I love him. And he still manages, to make it easy.

Happy Valentines Day.