Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.

Me and Alex went to the park again. We were quiet for a little bit there, and not the good quiet but the bad quiet, the stormy, low-pressure-front, carrion-crows-circling kind of quiet that made me nervous, and I was never nervous around him. "Dani, I'm sorry," he finally said. We were nearing some young pines crowning a hill, their needly little arms circling protectively around a patch of soft, thick grass. He took my hand and led me into the secluded center of the trees. "We can't let this come between us," he said. I suddenly felt prickly and cold with déja vu; I'd been here before and Alex had too and so had Delia. The two of them had been lying exactly where we came to lie on the day I stumbled on the two of them together.

"We're better than that, Dani," he said. "Maybe" was the only word I could squeeze out. I couldn't quite speak, there were too many ghosts in the air, stealing oxygen. Ghosts in my hair, ghosts rising in my throat, making a hard lump. "Only maybe?" he said incredulously. "Dani, look at me." I looked at him, at his swollen eyes, his skin, his bone, the muscles in his face that wrapped like bandages and published emotions, meanings. I looked at his atoms and felt the tiny particle forces that kept him from flying apart.

"I love you. I won't let something like that happen again, I promise. Please say I haven't made you fall out of love." "Of course you haven't; and I'm not mad at you. I didn't stop loving you. The problem isn't that I don't love you." Then what was the problem? I could not say; a sob clawed its way up through my chest but I trapped it behind my teeth in time. He put his arms around me.

"Whatever it is, we're stronger than it. We're more than twice the sum of our parts because I have you and you have me." Oh Alex, his eyes painful, our atoms crackling static like an old t.v., our muscles slipping and jerking and moving too fast to let anything heal. I wanted to believe him, to believe his words like I believed in his eyes and in the headache we both shared, but there were too many ghosts.

Maybe he didn't believe in ghosts, but I cried finally and he held me and my eyes swelled up too and we were more alike now so I felt a little better. And then I asked to go home, and my mother eyed me suspiciously upon my entering the house but stayed mercifully quiet, the best thing that happened all day.

--

What I meant to say earlier was, his taking me to where I'd seen him and Delia together just felt weird. We lay in the grass just like they'd lain in the grass. We looked at the clouds just like they'd looked at the clouds. I really don't feel like it's a mark of devaluation because obviously Delia's been to the movies and places like that with Alex just like I have - it's just that that little bit of grass felt like sacred ground and I was an intruder.

I don't know why he took me there. He probably has his own reasons, and I have to trust in that. God, we've only been together a month. I want us to make it; I want us to pull through because I know we're bigger than the shit and the pettiness and the dumb lies that break up most relationships. We're better than that because we're us, and like he said, we're more than twice the sum of our parts since we've got each other. It's true. I feel like I'm taller suddenly, fuller, more solid. I could be a tower, a minaret. Not only that. I could be a bird, or thousands of tiny clouds in the sky. What I am sure of is that I haven't fallen in love and I'm not in love. Rather, I have risen in love, and love is in me.