Jaguar, Rectified

“This is getting out of hand.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I offer no solutions.”

“Maybe you should stop trying.”

“Maybe.”

And she rolls the linguine in a substandard tomato creme. She’s forming questions greater and of more import than she lets on. She always is.

“Would it be so bad?”

“It is so bad.”

The sound of china and silver colliding like gravitationally collapsing helium in some time-engine powered nebula closes in on her looking away and our breathing slows and falls away.  It falls away forever while some greater creation of some mental Andromeda forms behind those eyes. She looks away from herself toward me.

“I’ve never known anyone who has a harder time when they’re happy.”

“I’m never happy, you know that.”

“Do you think,” she says crushing the dust of the gods into plasma, “that happiness may be something you wouldn’t recognize if you had it?”

And while I struggle again to answer in some way that makes her at least sound wrong, she moves her fork toward a zucchini doomed forever to mediocrity and a bland tomato creme, but soon to be destroyed in the furnace of life and recycled again into untold synaptic insight.

” I like this song,” I say as I turn to my beer.

“Me too. I never figured out what it’s about.”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s glycerine used for, anyway?”

“Lots of things.  Actors put it in their eyes to make themselves cry when the script calls for it.”

“Huh.”