Behold the Passive-Aggressive Widow-Maker

It's a lot like drowning; no, it's exactly like it, if the timespan could be stretched and drawn like Lucifer's taffy over the course of wasted months and years. Would his favorite flavor have to be cinnamon? And what is time anyway? Relative, like the rest of it; like the lake beyond my black-socked toes as I lay here on this un-pulled-out couch in the cabin of a withered, bitter man who hates me without my calling him Father (and to think I threw my dad's knife into this tea brown abyss two years ago to keep her necklace safe after she'd lost it in the drink). I sip my third beer of a seasonal variety twelver and stare at the deceptively glistening September water. It's seventy-six outside and the ducks still dive for snails so big it looks like they should choke. I watch the shells squeeze down their necks and almost gag vicariously. Still, this isn't swimming weather, or dying weather, as far as the animal kingdom is concerned. The denial-smiled boaters floating by are safe from hypothermic shock, but only a fool would venture out on what we've ironically got here: one-and-a-half working jet-skis and a partially-inflated rubber raft. Then again, only two fools would've made most of the decisions we have thus far, collectively and on our own separate failings. The fucking, the dating, the moving in together and consolidation of commodities. What kind of moron gives away his mattress so soon, and to a kid who doesn't put sheets on his bed? What kind of self-respecting genius would succumb to all that loathsome locked-downedness; oh, right: a self-deprecating one, or the two it took to Tango this time as it always does in tales such as ours. So here we sit, myself on this hand-me-down, farted-into-a-million-times couch and she on the non-matching cushioned chair in the corner that'd be ideal for any number of deviant sexual positions that we'll never attempt again in the company of one another, maybe not at all until we're finished licking our wounds and ready to look and lick elsewhere. I'm pecking at a dusty keyboard between swigs, she's nose-deep in a borrowed book that she'll finish today if it takes her last sarcastic breath and we're both knee-deep in shit that neither will own up to for the sake of battered pride and the dreaded fear of Who Gets To Keep The High Thread-Count Sheets? Who will lay the final sword down? Who will swallow their well-chosen words? Hopefully neither one of us yet since it's a four-hour drive back to civilization and we took her car for gas mileage purposes. I love my Jap truck and have made beautiful lust in it, but it's no subcompact sports car on any day of the week. It's a hell up in Harlem and no different here in the Adirondacks, but at least the terrorists didn't blow anything important up on yesterday's tenth anniversary of The Day We All Hate To Remember (aside from many Hellos and a handful of Goodbyes). Or maybe they did their dirty deed and we don't know it yet. Maybe the effects are still pumping down the pipeline, not ready to be felt yet, like a shockwave from a distant bomb that knocks us off our feet and into a vat of refuse more repugnant than our own. Maybe they poisoned the reservoirs and aqueducts and the outcome won't show until nine months from now when the first batch of mutant babies are born. I'd like to think we're safe from all the sadistic hocus-pocus of the madmen, but if we're scared enough to wonder then the turbaned ones have won. Besides, it's not shrill-voiced Arabs who will kill us in the end; our battlefield lays on the inside of our fortress, in the mind that's left to wander, on this lake that looks enticing but will only yield shameful shivering and an awkward ride home lined with broken promises and threats that sound relieving. Go West, young infidels. Carry your baggage to freedom, or at least out of harm's way of your parents' shortcomings. It's not so bad, this poisoned, frigid lake they've left us. Once you get beyond the smell you've practically got it licked. This last beer's hit triumphantly. I see the sun through the leaves again despite handprints on the sliding-glass door. Anyone care to take a dip?