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Divorce papers in my glove box

Lucio H. Cooper

10:00 pm-

    I made excuses why I couldn’t make love to her that night.
    “What is it this time!” she screamed, “heartburn, asthma, pain in your back?”... “There is someone else isn’t there?” (she started crying)
    I quickly got out of bed and sat on the cold bathroom floor, I felt sick again, impaled on my own self-made misery. I spent a lot of nights like that, ignoring her, talking to a half open fridge door at three am, obsessing, or in my library praying she wouldn’t get up in the middle of the night and ask me to come to bed. Yes, I had the power to destroy her happiness, to walk away for good this time.

1:00 am

    I made an excuse to go out to the car twice so I could talk to myself. There they were in the glove box. Folded and unfolded a hundred times. Read over and over again. I rehearsed the words in the rearview mirror. I didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel myself. My hands shook and I couldn’t concentrate. I held inside of me a deep incision of serrated pain, in my head I was a coward again, running away from problems. I always ran, I ran from the Marines, from college, from all my fucking emotions. I ran straight into dive bars, walking home side-ways, under the same crooked moonlight that poured down my back like acid...
    I started the car and pulled out of the driveway. She heard the tires gargling pebbles from inside the house, a thousand ice picks to her ears. She knew I would come back home very late at night drunk, or maybe even not at all. I headed down the street for the bar, dragging my thorns deep into the distant screaming ghost in my rearview mirror.

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