Focus

The negligible breeze is out of the south, just dry enough to make my skin itch. It blows my unruly silver gray hair into my eyes. It isn’t hot, but it isn’t cool by any stretch. I could turn to my left, and if I did, it would blow those same rebel hairs away from my face. But that would, in fact, take effort, something requiring energy; not so much forethought as actual caring. I have none of that. But, I do have to make a plan. So I stand stock still, my gaze on the distant horizon. I focus on nothing visible, but I am focused.

The body lying at my feet, covered in the gritty dirt of the mesa and flies (god, my mother had hated flies), is someone I know, or rather knew. Not sure of the proper grammar here…Anyway, someone I had known well, to be precise and more to the point, someone I was married to for too long. I’ll just say we had grown apart, gone our different ways (some more different than others.)

His growing apart was done with the aid of a small herd, a stable of three or four ardent hanger-onners over the years. I had done my growing apart by no longer giving a damn. Weary of late, unwilling to expand my idea of our family circle into a family circus, one that would include his community projects, as he liked to call them. In retrospect, I think if I had been more accepting of his projects, (they did after all serve a convenient function in my favor keeping his attentions off of me which was an honest to god plus in their favor) I might have been able to continue in our “relationship” a bit longer. I might have been able to overlook the insult. But alas, it was not to be, and I could not.

The final straw came this morning when I reached for my sunglasses in the wood bowl on the shelf near the front door. The bowl contains all manner of flotsam and jetsam of a busy couple, a couple too busy to be bothered with managing their lives cleanly. The bowl contained my traveling essentials – sunglasses, keys, doggie poop bags, random coupons, and his stuff – sunglasses, keys, loose change, and random girlfriend’s tube of lip gloss… wait, what?

Oops.

I’m thinking as I stand there gob smacked again at the fact that he has no clue (because, let’s face it, he never had a clue in his entire life) that the lip gloss does not belong to me, his wife. Even if, in the absence of a clue, he had had a brain, he would have known instinctively that the item was not the right shade for me, his wife, and taken steps to ensure that I, his wife, did not encounter this in-your-face kind of incriminating evidence. It was not that I was surprised that he had a girlfriend. I have just preferred to keep the fact that I knew about his dalliances close to my size-B flat chest, my little sumpin-sumpin, another nugget in my arsenal of leverage to be used when the time came for truth and dare. I had no need to stuff my bras with socks, I had the stuff property settlements were made of.

I stopped my ponderings. My gut burbles…could be the three-day-old takeout leftovers from the Curry Counter, but no, once again I am gob smacked The unfamiliar feeling was pity. Girl number two was being slighted in their relationship too. The man cannot (could not) be bothered to appreciate the unique qualities distinguishing his girlfriend from his wife. Our tastes/tones clearly so very different, and yet he cannot distinguish? Because logic leads one to assume that if he was cognizant of our differences he would have recognized that the too-pink gloss belonged to his girl behind door number two, and not to me, his wife busily slamming door number one. He would have picked the offending item up and stashed it quietly in his jacket pocket where I would have found it later when I performed my nugget gathering ritual. Even now I try to make excuses for him. Perhaps it was too warm for a jacket and he therefore had no pocket to save his day. Or maybe he just didn’t have a clue. Let’s go with that, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to fall for his piteous efforts to convince me he found the stuff quite soothing on his chapped lips – great stuff, why hadn’t he thought to try it long ago? At least, his lips looked chapped, lying there with flies on them. Chapped from over use on that girl behind door number two; certainly not a result of touching mine in the last decade.

So, in the long run, was it the difference in shade preferences that had drawn him to her? Why had he married me, obviously a Winter, to begin with if he was drawn to a Spring? Do people change like the seasons?

As I stand here in the late afternoon breeze coming off the hills to the south… I can’t help but muse. We are not that different after all, door number two girl and I with her too-pink gloss and the season thing aside (after all, it is only a theory)…Oh wait, my bad. There was also the age thing. A smallish oversight, or in this case, a 15 year aberration.

The flies are relentless, expanding their territory to include my bare arms. Time to get moving. I kick at the dirt, covering the deep brown blood stain just enough… now, how to move the body…and where?