Strange Dream – One and the Same

The former wife and I were umbilically connected. We faced the former husband who sat on a stoop or a tiny coffee table. In his hands was a book. He opened it up to a specific page and began reading: “The truth, as it cuts through the silence and disfigures the dream, has a way of bringing the blur of our former life into crisp focus. I loved her once, as deeply and intensely as the as the blood flow to the heart after the first kiss from her lips, back when our eyes flickered with hope and possibility–and all those greeting card aphorisms that described what our love was and has been and could be were splendid reminders of our seemingly eternal happiness together. I loved her once. I loved her. I loved. I. I love. I love her. I love her no. I love her no more.” He closed up the book, and tucked his chin into his chest, and sighed or cried or both, but in sheer silence. The silence itself was unbearable. The former wife and I remained immobile. Then, as if the passage was about me, I placed my hand on the former wife’s shoulder, began weeping and walked away. The cord that kept me and the former wife attached snapped, creating a kind of disorientation and isolation within myself that was so audible it took away my hearing. The poet who was the former wife and not the current wife (not the current of anything that is obvious), but who beneath the words sliced through the space and time of his self-deception and denial, and could still provoke him from afar. She was the current and recurrent wave that rippled through his every second of existence. When he declared the ending to the story by wrapping it up nicely through rhythm and a dramatic bow of defeat or shame or both, he was unknowingly turning his power over to her, and the harder he tried to convince me and the former wife of his transition, the more attached he became to us both.