wildscape. literary journal

Why My Love Handles Heavy
by Jessica Bell

I.       The man I love is sitting less than six feet away. Six is an important number because it’s the number of years we never made and the number of feet we were once expected to keep            between us.         In public, when the world stopped and shut down and everyone thought it might end and somewhere along the way we did but the world kept moving, kept dragging us through its mud and maybe I don’t entirely understand the significance of the number yet. The man I love(d?) is sitting three hours and thirty-nine minutes away from me and maybe he’s asleep but maybe he’s pacing except I don’t know if he ever loved me enough to do the pacing.

II.                The man I grew to resent and who resented me is texting me, over and over in my mind but really only once, Would you like for me to leave you alone? Because even when I am no longer his I am expected to do the work.                 The work of anger and of caring and of thinking and of dog walking and of cleaning up ferret shit and of cooking and of meal planning and of aborting babies and of folding laundry and of dusting and of abandoning homes and family because we want different things but the man I love can’t stop staring

         open-mouthed at me in a Lowes parking lot when I try to spill over my edges. When I try                 to tell him that I spent a year working and cooking and cleaning and crying in the place he wanted me to live, with and for him, wanting only

to die.

III.               The man I am afraid of looks at me with fear in his eyes when I laugh an exhausted woman’s laugh instead of the melodic girlish one he’s spent almost six years laughing alongside. He plugs his ears with invisible fingers he isn’t hearing me I am suffocating I am dying I am  
splitting                               open.

I cannot abort a baby and not need to cling to the father and I cannot hold that father close to me without remembering how it felt to read text messages between him and his ex-girlfriend, telling her things like you’re the one I think of when I fall asleep at night knowing that same night I was asleep next to you

         and restless

                     and pregnant   with your child. There is more               than six years’ worth of hurt and social distance braced behind a dam I reinforced over and over and over with empty promises.

Of dog walks and flowers and dinners and interlocked fingers not dropped within the aisles of another Lowes I once spent months trying to write a poem about because the relationship between us could not hold my words.

IV.    The man I love is a ghost haunting the halls of my brain that look exactly like the upstairs hall of our first house and I am ruined between the boards and nails and faulty wiring of that same house he wanted both of us to abandon. The heat didn’t work our first January and the heat burnt itself out

         between us when I could not help him pay our bills and shame sits inside every dollar sign I see and still

                                 I could not afford to be his wife. I could not stay in a little blue house in a little blue-gray mountain town and pretend I was not suffocating. I could not bear the thought that one day he would expect a baby boy to share his name despite the way he pushed for me to just go to the doctor and get some pills you’ll just take some pills but don’t tell anyone you’ll just take some pills don’t tell anyone just take some pills don’t tell anyone take the pills

                                 don’t tell  take pills don’t tell don’t tell don’t tell     

                                                         I think he might hate me for those things. The man I loved was dissolved inside the weight of a life I couldn’t pay for but don’t know that I wanted and I will spend years digging all of his pieces out.

The man I loved disappeared inside the heaviness of my poverty; bowed under the weight of my hands when I tried only to hold him closer; grew to screaming at me two days before Christmas when he was sick with Covid and loving me and all six of those feet.

The man I loathed               yelled at me from the staircase that I was going to get a job by February first and if I did not then I would get the fuck out of his house.

The man I loved slept soundly on nights I laid awake, nights I cried myself to sleep because the dishes were not done or laundry was not folded or because we had not had sex or because we had and somehow at the end of it I was even emptier

                                                         than before.

V.    The man I hate                                grabbed my hips in the kitchen and once held a trash bag over my head because he thought

I’d find it funny. When I didn’t, the man I came to fear tried to make a joke and looked at me as if I were crazy for not laughing.

The man I once loved died, not physically, not where I could see it anywhere but in his eyes, when I was poor and depressed and needy. When I took and took and took but never gave him anything he wanted or valued back. The man’s eyes are burned into my own when I look in the bathroom mirror of a lowes I never went in with him and we made it nearly five and a half years and six has never felt like a dirtier number.

I have never felt freer. Never felt more frightened of the kind of love that lies behind those green-gray eyes sitting in my head—for five and a half years that love has been anxious and scared and painful as it poured itself out into a man I am not sure I know.

                                 I am not sure of the woman who spent nearly six years too poor, too sad and sick and scared to say Yes, I would like you to leave me alone, to scream and fight back for herself—

VI. Here six becomes mine and the woman becomes an I and I become an overdrawn bank account; an inflated currency; a shameful dollar sign as a dirty, crumpled up bill panting into its own skin.

         I become inside out. Six                 becomes green; ink stained into an old carpet; a kitten’s lost claw.

                     The love inside me sits heavy on that dollar sign heart—thick and marred and worthless.                 It cannot make a house payment. It cannot take a man on vacation or pay a vet bill or do anything

         outside of beat                     like a begging fist against a wall.

                     I love you is a crack in marshmallow white paint.

                                I wish we’d never met a gouged out hole in cheap sheetrock.

         I hope I never see you again is a crater in an upstairs bedroom where a man once threw his video game controllers when loving me

                                and losing became synonymous. I wish it hadn’t come to this

                        almost like a handwritten anniversary                                                                                                  

VII.

         on a calendar that was never written,

                                    because here is the only place that six will come to exist 

for us        

                                                             and we no longer do.

about the author // Jessica Bell