The Calendar By Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

For weeks, I watched her ruining the relationship. Too many kitchen train wrecks. Coffee grounds rimmed the sink. Coca Cola stuck to the floor tiles. For years he kept the perfect pen for me magnetized to the refrigerator door. The new girl woke at birdsong, brewed coffee, and drowsily drew marks with her cheap BIC. Her handwriting sloppier than ketchup stains.

But there was an earlier time. I watched him, living without a girlfriend. I hung in the bedroom. He had stopped flipping the dates, or looking into the landscapes which accompanied them, Austria, Africa, and the Florida Keys. Places he would never conquer. Too beautiful, too foreign. Nights, I, Atlaslike, shouldered time. He had lost interest in tomorrow morning.

Then he met her, and I’d wondered if over the past months he wouldn’t have been happier flipping Playboy pics. When she first arrived, I still hung in the bedroom. She walked into his old life, a new door. There were skeletons in her closet — musty clothes at the very least. Naked, eager, clutching her tits like berries, she threw herself spread-eagle, an eroticized moment. Hours fled. Time stood gawking.

She looked intelligent, but she talked funny — slatternly babble, intense needs, wants, lousy plans ahead. She took me along to the toilet seat, slacks pooled at her ankles, filling me with hysterical promises, broken dates. She put me across her lap, her naked thighs, smudged me with lip gloss, nose mucus, her tears, a speck of menstrual blood. His pen left faint traces. Once I was a household Buddha. Now I was a K-mart replica. Like any other tool in a rubbish heap.

He celebrated her birthday. She missed his. He rescued me from the bathroom, hurt, flipping past the soiled pages to the days that earmarked her memory.

© 2014 Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and essayistliving in Santa Fe, NM. His poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Chiron Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Pedestal, and other places. His essay Reality Publishing was included in the anthology MFA vs. NYC.