“Aren’t we enough?” You’re asking me. I’m pulling at the dog’s white hairs that find themselves wedged everywhere, even under our skin. I wish they were thorns. I wish they were pricking deeply enough to pull from me something better than

“I don’t know.” I feel like I’m looking at you through pool water. I think blue raspberry Kool Aid has a better color. I wish you had some to dump over my head. Good game, bitch, you’d say. And I’d like that better than

“Well, you’re enough for me.” You sound strong, so I leave the dog hairs and meet your eyes. I once found you, this, us… to be more than enough. I followed it around the grocery store with empty produce bags stuffed in my raincoat pockets. I nourished it with texted nudes and excessive teeth whitening. I prayed to it mid-flight, halfway across the Atlantic. I married it, and we were happy– it and I.

One of the worst nights we had together, I underestimated the broil function and overestimated your patience. I didn’t want to watch The Godfather again and not even vodka sauce could calm the grating. The Godfather, you said, was very important. As, you added, was proper supervision when broiling. I left and took disc two of The Godfather with me. I threw it out the window during a stretch of road where there hadn’t been passing headlights for a while. I never told you that. Keeping a secret like that from you is a lot easier than

“Well, I need more.” I’m turning into that person, again. That person I asked you early on, before the broiling incident, to kill if I became her. I think I must have felt sexy proclaiming it. It seemed in the same lane as declaring I wasn’t looking for anything too serious and didn’t consider marriage to be end game. Statements of character. And your response to each a simple, same, sounded less final and a lot better than

“Since when do you even want kids?” You’re doing that thing I hate. That thing where you can’t, for the life of us, read my mind at all. It’s the other, rougher side of mystique. Like the vase of dried baby’s breath standing between us on the counter that’s pissing me off. You didn’t add water to it like I asked you to when I was away for work. But the colors, dyed pink and purple for Valentine’s Day, are just as vibrant as they were when I bought them almost a full month ago. The vase is bone-dry, but the flowers have died beautifully. That’s another thing I hate– my newfound, unfounded fury. There’s a lot of me that I’m still learning about. Still learning, which is better than

“Aren’t I allowed to change my mind about anything?” Which is exactly the same as, but still sounds better than

“I’ve changed my mind about everything.”