Eventually, We All Dissolve

She came in to ask me if I think she’s pretty. 

She slurs and clambers on me while some part of me watches, detached. I always like to see just how far a thing will go. 

All day long I’ve been thinking of a poem I read. The poet used the word deliquesce. To become liquid. As in decomposition. My uncle lay on his apartment floor for three weeks in the late spring heat. He loved no one. If you asked my family, we’d say the world was better off without him. Deliquesce, from the Latin de and liquiscere. Down. Dissolve. Become liquid. Where did you go just now, she says. I’ve been studying her face for a moment too long. Her eyelashes are coming off. Mascara and liner sweat into black crow’s feet around her eyes. I like to study just how pretty dissolves, watch the ink bloom like fresh bruises. All that careful painting, just to melt.

She’d had a rough night after all, what with the accident and her car looking the way it did. She asks me do you think I can report this to my insurance? I shake my head, tell her to Google what a side swipe looks like, before making a false report with pictures. I know how to lie. She’s sweating already, the cocaine and alcohol give her a rind that my sensitive nose rejects. She tells me this will ruin her career. Surely you can take an Uber to the club, I said, might even save on gas money. No, she tells me. She’s applying to the Police Academy. She asks me to come look at her car. She asks me if she can hide it in my garage. 

It’s late, and I haven’t been sleeping. I’m working on a poem titled “I Don’t Think I Understand Love.” It’s autobiographical in the way that almost all poems are autobiographical. Meaning, I know how to lie. I lie like my uncle. I try to tell her about it, just as she is sitting down, leaning over the coke. Absent-mindedly, I hold her hair.

When I get a chance, I herd her back into my living room, deposit her at the table. More cocaine is there, more booze, the plug is there, telling jokes. I’m praying this is enough to babysit. I can’t make sense of her face in flux, as stretched now as a clock in a Dali painting. Drape her over a tree, hang her out to dry. Last week she was crying, the hard ugly sobs of a person who has hurt, and is hurting. Love tears.

I try to explain to her about the Bukowski interview I read, where he stated simply, “yeah, I’m not a very good fucker.” But she’s only all moons about my hands in her curls. Now she’s tongue and lashes, she’s asking me to stay, she’s telling me she loves me. I keep thinking if I don’t peel her off of me I may see her face slide off entirely. I go back to my room.

My door opens and closes several times while I type. She’s in the background somewhere, asking if I think she’s pretty. So I mumble to her that sure, she’s pretty. And she is, even now. She’s like the rare, delicate crystal, the kind you can’t find anymore, with a snowburst crack. I once read that a flaw can make something more beautiful. My grandmother called it wabi. The flaw that makes an elegant whole. She put on a show in the living room before I left. The plug watched. He shrugged. Yet when she kneeled for him, she touched his face. It’s that moment I like her best. She whispered to him, gentle words only he could hear. 

Eventually, we all dissolve.

My uncle taped women just like her. The hazmat crew asked if we wanted them to dispose of “shocking material” before my family arrived to clear out anything worth salvaging. My mother wanted to understand. Later she’d say I never really knew my brother.

She’s knocking around my bathroom like a poltergeist. After she throws up she asks me if I want to make out. I say no. But still, I close my laptop and walk her back to the table. I sit down with a beer, tell her about my own hit-and-run, my red Ford Tempo with the faded words “fire department” on the side, and the driver of the sports car who waggled his finger at me. 

She says her sugar daddy will pay the damages. She says he’d pay extra if I fucked her and him together. She won’t remember this in the morning, and the poem will wait for me. She deserves to fall apart a little, and I have a fondness for sad things. I don’t think I understand love, but I do know about touch, how we all need it. I can look into her charcoal smudge eyes a little while longer. I think I see tears, but I don’t press. She knows I’m no good for things like that. One tear falls and I pretend I don’t see, hand her a kleenex while I do a bump. Finally, she says, I’m a mess. I've got nothing for that. The poem was in me even then, but I could feel it dissolving. Such a shame, all that careful painting, just to melt.

Rachel Lauren Myers is a poet and writer living in Massachusetts. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Action, Spectacle, Ballast, ISSUE01, Resources, Okay Donkey, SoFloPoJo, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. She is the features editor for MEMEZINE. She almost always marries Shane in every Stardew Valley playthrough. She's been told she's very stalkable. She would like to know if you are mad at her.