fossils in a jar

I heard a story about death once. A girl I worked with told me about a time that she and her friends went to the fair. This is a place where traditions last for centuries and never ever flicker or falter, least of all being the fair. I heard once it was the oldest annual fair in the country.

I imagine it being the oldest in the world.

At the fair two of her friends bought chickens. Young ones, but not chicks, she said. They were still fuzzy but they were white and big. They brought them all around the fair with them. She was happy.

Then, on the drive home, they tossed the chickens out the car window and tried to hit them. They laughed along the highway, heads hanging out of their windows into the summer air.

I checked every cemetery from here to the ocean. Every trail in the forests. Every crushed beer can. I even hiked back up to the crest of that hill where we picnicked to see if it was there. There was no sign to tell me. No ghosts hanging heavy in the air where perhaps our love for one another was left, forgotten, as if we could just shed it like our clothes and forget to grab it again on our way out.

I thought that maybe it died the way Jesus did, or Basquiat. Or Lenin. Saviors and fascists and artists. They all rot the same once their flesh is underground, anyhow. The maggots and bacteria don't care who you are.

I bet the gods of decomposition didn't care about our love, either. They waltzed at its demise the same way they would have for anyone's.

I even drove back to that torched city and dug through the ashes. They were his ashes, naturally, but a part of me wondered if maybe the night I burned that city to the ground, I had accidentally left a part of you there, too.

After all, I had driven there at 93 miles an hour while you sat at our house in the bathtub downing a bottle of wine.

Remember when you used to never drink?

Remember New Years Eve?

I glanced at the wood-burning he gave me for Christmas. I thought about the matching one that he made for you too, and how the band-aid on the You is over the heart, and how the band-aid on the Me is on the ribs. I guess that was a good foretelling of the future. He can be clever and he hates to be clever, which makes me laugh. Usually I smile when I look at it and think about that. Today I screamed.

Perhaps I should torch that, too. I could bring it to the city and lay it down in the pile of ashes where that photograph of him kissing another girl sits, decaying like an only slightly painful memory. It could be a monument to my lovers loving others. Would that be trite? Would that discredit our relationship, by comparing it to blatantly to the one that came before it?

I don't want to offend, really. I just am struggling with trying to understand if I am a bad girlfriend or not.

Tomorrow I'm going to go to the ocean and look for fossils. You can come with me, if you want.



with love and squalor,
ekw