Together 

I was petrified and thirteen and determined to jump from the high dive. First in the pool I stood on the board’s edge and looked down to water so clear it seemed nonexistent. I’d visualized this jump for a day. The painted lines on the bottom had no ripples. Distance vanished with such certainty that I dove, rather than jumped.

A friend met his wife the old way a year before online dating switched from weird and embarrassing to the norm. There’s a pool of people so crowded that many just pop out of the pool and are deposited, bruised on the ground. There isn’t enough room and it’s lucky they’re wet which makes it easy to pop. And there’s always another pool that’s not so full with messages like tornados and cocktails.

He said that in another year, he would have gone online to date.

It’s not like we had the slightest idea what we were doing. I was basically a composite of Mike and Harry, Liza, a few teachers, and my parents mixed together in a 60’s test tube. Why did I think in kindergarten that everyone in my town was nuts? I didn’t know that I had to go. I pretended to be on summer vacation when I left for the last time.

Colleen followed Tinkerbelle, who darted anywhere away from Spokane.

There are rules. I take out the trash and recycling and plan money things but she pays the bills. I chop onions, do the dishes after she makes monumental meals. I deal with mice; she cooks the rice and sends an endless stream of cards to a mountain of people in a mind-boggling array of organization as I look on slack jawed. Her desk is abstract art, perhaps Kandinsky, while mine alternates between a hurricane and its eye. I fix broken things and use the Internet like a divining rod even though I’m allergic to it.

There are no rules. A friend and his wife have a plan of who vacuums when, who cleans what, when…who… how… in what way? I evaporate into dream visions of garden while she transforms ceramic pots into luminous flower islands and grows food. I do preventive things that save time but there are so many that the time’s all taken.

And, of course, we alternate who sleeps on which side of the bed all the time, right?

How were we supposed to have a road map to life when all we could find anywhere were jangled, frayed wires supposed to fit together in some way as if there were a manual?