Morning Thanks

It was a cloudy grey sky complete with drops of rain on my face as I rode my bicycle to work, thinking about how you spent so much time adjusting your orange tee shirt on your arms and shoulders. I could not figure out exactly what you were trying to achieve, but I found it charming. I am told that these things should be irritating me by now because that is what happens when you get married. Along with not having sex anymore.

(In my experience, these things happen before you get married the first time, but you are too wrapped up in wedding planning and living arrangements to notice, and if you do notice, it's too late now to call it off because what would people say? You'll go through with it. You'll make it work. It's better if he loves me more than I love him, isn't it? Isn't it?)

Even your inability to use soap anymore after it has reached a certain small size only makes me shake my head in wonderment. Why don't you throw it away? Why do you hide it under the new big bar of soap? You know that I will continue to use the small soap until it is gone. And because of this, I never get big soap. I am a soap martyr.

This morning a few blocks from my work, a young woman was killed on her bicycle, hit by a perhaps speeding pick-up truck. Both people were probably at fault, and it's a terrible thing. But how do you live after that? I might wish that I were dead, too.

If I were alone.

It changes everything, happiness does. Equal shares in a love relationship. For instance, I hardly ever surf porn anymore. I don't feel an insatiable need to go out every Friday and Saturday. I almost never sit on the couch and watch television shows on DVD and drink an entire bottle of wine by myself. (Unless you are away on business and I have been to two funerals in two weeks and have PMS.) I don't have tales of woe or drama to relate, which has led me to entirely uninteresting telephone conversations with people I have not seen in a while and an obsession with celebrity gossip sites, which are, I suppose, my new porn, as I am having sex, but I am still not famous. Probably because I did not parlay having sex into a career, but those possibilities are behind me.

And all of these things are good. I do not miss the things that have changed. Except for my old body, which was thin and fit but lonely. In this new body, it is easier for me to smile at strangers on a rainy sidewalk or appreciate the fact that the outdoor cat who we have adopted likes to sit in the plants in the front of the house and meow before you can see him. Now I am surfing the internet for puppies, not porn, and I feel linked to you with every cell in my body.

Even the fortune cookies seem to know that I don't need them anymore...