Unmentionables

There's an enormous planter on your deck shaped like an urn. It's filled with dirt and a few green weeds whose tendrils shimmy in the hot night wind, tickling the cement lip of the container like an inadequate tongue searching for something. You offer your hand, but it lacks interest.

You hope for tiny victories.

You accept the consequences, and then your retract your acceptance. You play dumb. You contemplate moving out, moving on, becoming something enviable or pitiable or anything other than what you know you are. You wish someone would just reach out and touch you. You encourage your resident fruit flies to think big, blossom into bees and sting you in your sleep. You imagine becoming their captive, fingers and toes bound with garbage-bag twist ties.

You consider the advantages of getting back to a fiber rich diet. You eat preservative rich bread. You miss the sound of him shitting in the hotel room and how he refused to urinate in front of you when you were hiking. You were walking around patches of mud thinking about the way your parents could always identify trees and you can only identify things like esoteric publishing companies and tropes and the ripeness of fruits and you wish you could stay with him forever, counting the years like rings in wood.

You sit for hours looking at the urn-shaped planter. The front has an unbecoming mud stain bleeding from it's neck onto it's belly. You wish you had some paints so you could transform it into a piece of art deserving of it's architecture. You would cover it in a perfect semi-matte pistachio, line it's lips and hips with jealous black, sketch your bodies - his and yours - facing one another. Figure A carries a staff and wears the head of a Caterpillar. Figure B wears the mask of leaves and grovels at the foot of Figure A, offering her head for his nourishment. You consider this contribution compensation for quitting your lease. You imagine the next tenants calling your hieroglyphs "kitsch" and covering it with creeping plants or some cheerful purple do-it-yourself sponge job. You accept the consequences.