This is the Way the Ladies Ride

Susana Ponce

I. The Tea Leaves
I saw our end on her calendar, marked with three overlapping circles in black sharpie pen. She was excited for our beach day finally planned after weeks of wishing. One circle wasn’t enough. I watched her draw them and felt they were being looped around me, tightening, creating a palpable pressure in my own body, pressure in the space around us. I commented on the menacing nature of the black circles and she smiled at me.
“Don’t worry so much,” she said.
For the next two weeks the circles bore down on me from their spot high up on the kitchen wall. I tried not to worry; I tried not to look up. It didn’t help that she kept smiling up at it over the leftover tealeaves in her cup. Tea leaves that she picked herself from the small garden she cared for out back. Her custom made brew, she would say.
“Consult the leaves,” I said.
She looked at me. She looked at the calendar, and then she dumped the tealeaves and kissed my neck.

II. No Such Thing as Us in a Void
The day arrived and I was desperate.
“Stay in bed and let me hold you,” I said. So we stayed there without noise.
I imagined we could exist in a void. Away from the furniture and DVDs and apartment we shared. Everything erased and only us together stuck in hibernation, but we can’t exist in a void. It’s really just impossible because then it wouldn’t be a void at all. All our past, the first kiss on the couch, the first plate of hers I broke, it would be there too. History claws its way in every time.
“The beach,” she said. She shifted to get up and the bed dipped, anticipating the loss of her weight.

III. Maybe We Will be All Right
The drive was optimistic. The sunshine stretched across the car making me feel light. We listened to the radio the whole way.
When Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” came on she gave me an enthusiastic serenade with winks and hand gestures. It was nice. I held her hand and didn’t even make a face when she failed to indicate with her lights before changing lanes.

IV. How We Met
She saw me in a bookstore. I was there with a friend and wasn’t buying anything. That’s how these things happen though, the real moments the ones possessing a kind of gravity that can sit on whole weeks, months, years of a person’s life. These moments tend to slip in-between the mundane without our noticing, catching us unaware.
I was wandering from shelf to shelf. I remember dragging my feet, trying hard to pick up as much static electricity as possible. I stopped to look through a book.
“You should buy it. Trust me, it’s good.”
She was next to me then. I told her I already had it. I had bought the book years ago and spent three days murmuring the words as if trapped in a dream.
“It’s my favorite,” I said.
“Mine too,” she said.
A year later, when she figured we were a safe enough distance from it she admitted it was a lie. She had never even heard of that book. She tried reading it those first few weeks we were seeing each other, but stopped when it got too weird. I didn’t speak to her for two days.

V. We are Not All Right
We fought then she walked away crying and left me on the beach. She took the bag with all the towels, so for a long time I just stood there feeling stupid with the sand creeping in-between my toes.
Someone once told me that sand is formed with the erosion of larger rocks over time. I thought about how creepy it is that the rock is undergoing this painfully slow death and all it can do is keep still—stoical. Then I wanted to cry because I couldn’t believe she left me alone in the middle of a fucking graveyard.

VI. Ancient Fortune Telling
On the way home she remembered the fridge had no milk so we stopped at the grocery store. When we got in the store she walked way ahead of me like she does when she’s angry, so while she was passing the cereal I was still in frozen foods. The whole time like that. She was already outside when I reached the doors to exit.
I looked up and saw my muted reflection in those sliding doors. I was there, but sort of blotted out, made softer in the tinted glass. My body was centered so the doors cut me right down the middle and for a moment I existed as those two halves and when they slid open my image was torn apart. No longer contained, but ripped to either end of the doorframe in a sweet split. I saw my own insides fly up and smack against the night sky.
And I knew if she looked up she would see it all—all of me. She would gaze on my intestines dripping down the big dipper and know her future. She would see and not be able to find me because I wouldn’t be there.
It was all too raw. I felt a violation had occurred. So I ran and kissed her the way I don’t like to in public. Obscenely. She never once looked up.

VII. In Which She is Named
We can make this right. I’m not afraid. I can name her here once and for all and claim her as my own.
Let me sing her name gentle and slow like a lullaby. Let it ravel around us in a golden thread that binds forever. I will chant it in a spell over and over and over again so that she may sleep. She is safe.
I will hide her in this void made especially for two. We can make it work, so easy if we try. Come follow me Amie. It’s possible. It is.