Would

She fell
out of love the way most people hoped to fall into it
brashly and without the stink of intention.

He shifted in bed. And she hated him for it. The way his body breathed sticky in her general direction. He rubbed his feet on her ankles with drowsy affection. And she hated him for it. He shivered with such steady dedication when her hair licked at his neck. And she hated him for it.

She felt a rolling impulse to punch him in the neck, bruise the jugular. Instead, she chewed on the corner of her pillowcase, souring.

She loved him in the way one loves nostalgia, grappling for voided air-that is to say that she did not love him at all, only gestured towards it. Except when his voice slipped into that damp space. It was shallow and as uninterested in her as she was in him, and the weight of that, the vague murmur that she could be to him as he was to her, collapsed against ribs with the weight of everything that had ever recycled between them. Everything grew meaty in those moments.

These were the moments she believed in.

Humiliation is something of a parade.

Maybe he’d die in his sleep. These things have been known to happen. A brain aneurism. A silent heart attack. A mysteriously unrecognized and untreated ailment. Really, he was a ticking time bomb. If it were to happen, if he were to combust peacefully in sleep-she’d wake up
and roll his weight back and forth with the force of both hands and when the body would not respond appropriately she would climb out of bed, tunnel her feet into the house slippers tucked half-way under the bed and shuffle towards the closet-the sleep still gnawing in her lids. She would pack a suitcase. She would not need much. Her toothbrush, a pair of pajamas, four shirts, two pairs of pants. And underwear, plenty of underwear. Few things disturbed her more than the thought of running out of clean underwear. The last things she would do would be to turn their wedding photo onto its face, because this was the definitive gesture empowered heroines made midway through movies. The resulting catharsis would be disappointing, more silly than she had anticipated.

Then she’d walk out of the house and drive 400 miles, to Kenny. Nevermind that she hadn’t seen him in twelve years. He would still be living in the same open courtyard apartment complex, the kind with a pool in the center, calling all the tenants towards it with a force not unlike gravity. She would knock. He would open the door, long haired and beautiful at her expense. He would look exactly the same, aged 26. Nothing would have changed, except perhaps his mouth, a thin upper lip-noble and disproportionate to the fleshier lower. He would look surprised but not shocked, as if he had been expecting her but was unsure of the timing. He would open the door wider and it would not look like the door was being moved but as if the room behind it were growing larger and larger until she found herself in the belly of it. He would be brushing his overgrown hair out of his face, pushing it into an extreme and undefined right part. There would be a liquid quality to it-toss back the head, brush the hair, laugh.
It was enough

to make her fall in love
brashly and without the stink of intention.

His bedroom would still be inappropriately festive, Christmas lights stapled to ceiling corners and dripping soft shine. And then they would fall asleep, deflate on the spot as if their air had been vacuumed out of their toes and into the ground beneath them. And that would be everything.

-Saehee Cho January 2008