I.
I feel the tickle on the pink of my lips before it touches my mouth. Anticipation is only possibility. I
don’t bite. The peach sits in the fridge, the skin too perfect to puncture, if it sits long enough it will
rot, mold freckling the surface.
II.
I was married ten years before I told my husband I was bi. Told is perhaps too purposeful a word,
dripped is more appropriate. I let the words toe-dip their way into the water of him while we
watched The Great British Bake-off. They rippled their way through his bones until there was a
stillness on the surface of him. He knew. He knew the way you know your partner will always pick
the nuts out of the trail mix, only craving what is soft and sweet.
III.
The existence of the truth as a physical entity, syllables spoken and irreversible, made us brackish.
What do you do with water fresh and salty? It is undrinkable yet it doesn’t burn your eyes like the
saline rich ocean. What lives in this liminal body? It is not the crisp blue of some glacial fjord.
Murkiness prohibits you from seeing the bottom. My husband reached for it though, he reached for
the mud of me hoping I would not slip through his fingers.
IV.
I was satisfied. I did not need anyone else. Our love was not perfect, but like bruised fruit those
spots were soft and revealing. What no one tells you of marriage is that the person you say ‘I do’ to
is not going to be who you are married to ten years later. How absurd to think we do not change
and grow and let fall from the tree of us what is rotting. Marriage is a desire to meet your partner
time and again. Who is this person now, and are we soluble?
V.
I came out gasping for air. How quickly I got lost underwater, the brush of all that is green and wild
and wet against my skin seemed uncontainable, as if all that can tangle will, until I remembered I am
full of muscles and air. I pushed towards the surface and broke through. I emerged from some
depth of myself with pearls, shells holy from the beak of a seagull, seaweeds, and sand. I was rough
and rank but breathing. I am alive because of all I cannot see. What an obligation, to fill our lungs.
An obligation I am willing to fulfill. My husband, curious though cautious, pulls me to shore. He
asks me if we might dive to the bottom together next time.
VI.
We split the peach. Sometimes with a knife, a clean cut, a bifurcated beauty. Other times we pass it
back and forth, plunging our teeth into what is sweet, the juices dripping down our chins
unabashedly sticky.
