Straight No Chaser

Like a Sneeze, But Better

my hormones are raging. i think i’m going to be the kind of wife who engages in lots of angry sex. not rough sex, but angry sex, the kind where husband and wife glare at one another as they stalk to the bed, and leave just as angrily as they came (ha!). because, frankly, he can try his hardest to really upset me, and succeed, really crush my feelings, and i will sit and think miserably about how badly i want to kiss him. go to hell, shannon. kiss me, marcus. my love for you is a farce, shannon. kiss me, marcus. et cetera.

discontented with the way last night ended. the school has this menacing wrought-iron gate that goes all the way around, to keep danger out, because there are projects lining the surrounding streets on all sides. projects and foreclosed houses full of drug-addicted squatters. this is what they do with black colleges, plop them down in shitty neighborhoods, an intriguing bit of strategy considering the vast majority of hbc students (or at least spelhouse students) come from pronouncedly middle-class neighborhoods. me, for instance, i have no street smarts to speak of. everything i know about not getting mugged, raped, murdered, i’ve learned since coming to atlanta. anyway, wrought-iron gate. i was pushed violently into a bad mood last night, twenty-minute conversation gone bad, and i decided to walk the perimeter of the gate, on the outside, just to see how long it took.

and did, secretly hoping to get mugged, raped, murdered, or maybe just beaten to a pulp just off campus, so i could go to the hospital in an ambulance and have an excuse to call my mom. katrina says i don’t mention my mom enough, and that she hadn’t heard chad mentioned at all till today. mom would come if i landed myself in the hospital, and she’d bring dad and chad, and for the ten or twelve hours it took them to arrive i’d probably have marcus. paying attention. to me. without being nasty or sexy or rude, just sympathetic; yes it’s your faulti’m lying in a hospital bed, kiss my wounds and then my lips and we’ll call it even.

i dropped my keys somewhere. that wasn’t part of the plan. every time i actually follow through with one of those self-piteous little tear treks, i find some way to sabotage their effectiveness. one time last year i sprained my ankle, and earlier this week i cut myself on a piece of construction equipment and needed stitches, and then yesterday i dropped my fucking keys and had to retrace every one of my nine million steps, in the opposite direction, with one eye trained on the ground and the other scanning the sidewalk for thugs, because i think i actually don’t want to get mugged, raped, murdered, not this week.

we have to have a serious talk, if not tonight then tomorrow, about respect, and such. he doesn’t want to have that talk. i bet he thinks it’s going to make my week to chew him out, and he’s wrong. i don’t want to have that talk either. that’s what so many of them don’t understand, that it’s not the drama we thrive on, that really we feel best when things run smoothly, and that the drama (the endless conversations, the repetitive rehashing) are really just the only way we know how to keep things from derailing. i get chest pains when i hurt his feelings, and i’m the first one to back down when i think there’s any chance of wrapping up without reconciling. lack of closure turns me into this neurotic insomniac, doing ridiculous things like walking in giant gate-guided circles and staying up till five in the morning to watch the arts channel.

i would rather sleep peaceful and easy, and with the knowledge that he’s on the other side of campus doing the same thing, and that we’ll see each other tomorrow. and kiss, because we do that well, even when we’re angry.

“safe word is fandango.” who said that? i can’t remember, now, whether it was me or him. i do remember that we both said it at the same time.