Yom Kippur. They’re doing the Amidah, swaying silently in their little Zoom boxes. You glance at him, close to asleep in his chair with only one arm. He let you have the single good chair in the room. You try to find gratitude. He is fully out now. You want to hit him, knock him out of the bad chair.
It’s been a morning. Sugar spilled atop a kitchen cabinet. Grousing at the beginning of services. His job: pointing out the missteps. Yours: getting sullen, defensive. Who gives a fuck about sugar? So you bitch a little. They want to do breakout rooms to talk about their relationship to God, like that has anything to do with the High Holidays?
“Don’t criticize me,” you say to his slumbering form, “motherfucker.”
Marriage. Operating outside oneself, working together, a team. You couldn’t even handle group projects in high school. You marry, convinced things won’t change. Dream day in a bee-buzzed courtyard, photographer leaping for the shot, cheesecake taquitos and you were going to be the survivors. Your first real fights drama about nothing: masturbation, macaroni and cheese. Your lovemaking a loving and jagged thing, spiked with surprise, studded by spontaneity. Pictures of your hands intertwined, interlocked. Joined at the hip your friends say, not without its rancor.
He doesn’t so much fall from the pedestal as tumble softly a half step at a time.
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