Your Angry Backhand Hit the Light Bulb, Releasing Glass Shards All Over the Carpet, You, and the Time Continuum

When it broke, I went for the vacuum. 

No, you said, 

I want to pick up all the pieces by hand. 

We’re fighting. I’m ripping polygon fibers from your calluses and from in between your toes. Not to mention, now it’s dark. The flashlight cuts a slice through the room, your deep-sea voice, too, saying if you didn’t, I wouldn’t, you would, so I did. Everything is so big to you, everything is a bad omen or the world ending, especially me, not living up to the part. 

I used to love how big I could be, a world the size of your wingspan, but black holes merge, and you split hairs. Bad girl bats an eyelash, waves crash, killing an entire village 3,000 miles away. Worse woman waits three hours to send a reply; he could’ve died, four stitches in his fingers punching brick.

I’m too big; my pores are showing. I’m too big; it was me on the backend feeding your backhand, making us dark. Into my bloody fingers holding your bloody fingers, I spit out cheap facts to patronize you back, tell these tweezers the Big Bang came 10 billion years before the Earth coalesced into a planet and became whole, so what’s this nonsense about confusion, about the incalculable betrayal of me, standing in a bath towel too close to the window, when life, a whole life, is a human hair on an 8.4 mile track? 

If I am the villain, I will just become one, 

Turn everything so tiny and inconsequential, 

Or worse, God sent me specifically to smite you.

About your boxers, and the meaning of running a yellow light, or the amount of times life on Earth has had to nearly start from scratch, what about an eon for recovery, what about treating me like a meteor and you

the face of Arizona? Want to go back to when it was so easy? When spines weren’t straight, brains were too heavy, and you’d only live to be 25?

When I asked you, I expected a no, but never a silent spectator, so anger has made you into the man slamming his head into windows, driving 200 miles on an empty tank, saying I wanted it how I wanted it, why didn’t you let me have it (me). 

Once you told the maître d' I was expecting, touched my belly, and whispered “one day,” but you were always the only one expecting. 

I knew I should’ve run, that first day and the other, 

When you held my head outside the window sill 

And thought you knew what cancer felt like. 

Now, I have an empty dustpan and no more bloody hand towels, but here’s the real news: the sixth eon is weak and dehydrated, probably won’t make it to the half-mile marker. No? Surely you have something to say about something, or you wouldn’t be hanging around with your mouth open.

And when your mom says she knew it, could smell it from burnt toast and white trash, good, accept her pity. You no longer need to protect me. 

When we study the evolution of the universe and the Earth, it’s helpful to think of the passage of time as distance traveled:

One billion years is a kilometer 

One million a meter 

A year is a micron 

And you