Thursday, July 2, 2009

It Wasn't Until Then


By Meredith Rivlin
It wasn't until i left your house that i felt the glass.
It wasn't until i left your house and decided to take the long way home,
past the painted water and mountains, on one of the sunny, earth-scented, spring days that could still be counted on one hand,
with an empty stomach because we didn't know if we should
eat breakfast or lunch
or stay in bed sleeping and fucking until the next morning.
It wasn't until then that i felt the glass.

It was sharper than a pebble in my shoe,
and was certainly not round.
It wasn't irritating like a pebble was, making you kick it
to the front of your shoe and keep going, or yelling
"wait up!" to your friends as they walked ahead.
Instead it was a sharp pain in my heel,
so painful that i walked on the toes of my left foot
until i got to a bench where i sat down and took off my shoe
and carefully peeled off my sock.
It wasn't until then that i saw the glass.

Well, i really saw the blood first,
where the glass had entered,
punctured through the calloused skin of my heel.
i nervously picked at it, desperate to get it out immediately
but thinking the worst:
It was lodged in deep;
it had broken into tiny pieces inside my body
i would need surgery;
sterilization;
this was an omen for more pain to come from you.

it wasn't until then that i wondered what had happened
to cause glass to be on my side of the bed, not your side,
where some of my clothes lay in a bundle,
a piece of glass sneaking its way into my sock.
i tried not to imagine you with someone else where i just
pretended to sleep while i really
looked at the spines on your bookshelf.
i didn't want to picture you with someone else,
having such wild sex that you broke glass and didn't even stop
to clean it up.
(I later learned that your landlord broke a bottle when repairing your refrigerator
and that you must not have swept it all up.)
It wasn't until then that i questioned whether i liked you
because of your hair and vulnerability
or because i was nervous that my number of sexual partners
could now be rounded up.

I grabbed the tiny point that hadn't been impacted
completely in my foot yet.
I scraped the skin around it in desperation,
close to panic.
I looked around to see joggers in spandex,
shaded people walking leashed dogs,
families on vacation.
How can they go on walking
when there is pain and metaphor happening!

It wasn't until i took a deep breath and pulled hard
at what had caused such pain
while Aesop's Fables ran through my head:
lions and mice and thorns,
unexpected friends coming
of stereotypical enemies.
It wasn't until then that i removed the glass.
I pulled out the triangular shard,
now tinted red
and a drop of blood
formed on my once impermeable heel.


But only one drop.