My American Girlfriend Speaks to Me in Road Signs

ONE WAY:

My American girlfriend holds my hand loudly, like she’s giving fuck you, cishets because she thinks we’re way behind in Australia.

 

SPEED BUMP:

I’m not sure when she became my girlfriend exactly, maybe it was at the Uni orientation concert when she kissed me, her tongue like a slab of cold ham down my throat, me wondering if I’d better memorise the moment because the band might become famous one day.

 

SLIPPERY WHEN WET:

She wears t-shirts with ripped sleeves to show off her biceps, all bulge and throbbing veins with a tattoo of a scorpion, its stinger shaped like a penis.

 

HAZARD:

She asks me if I know where Iowa is, and I think somewhere in the middle which is maybe why she is middle about exactly nothing, and she says, what I wouldn’t give for some cherry pie right now looking like she’s about to eat me up.

 

KEEP LEFT:

She says we’re solid until I don’t show up to our special spot one day, and she’s throwing her muddy Americano coffee at me, spitting like a nail gun about what she’s had to swallow to live in this godforsaken place just to put up with this kind of crap, and who the fuck do I think I am?

 

YIELD:

And all I can think of is how we have ‘Give Way’ signs here, but in Iowa, they say “Yield.”

 

 

Please-Sorry-Thankyou

You had a way of saying please-sorry-thankyou in any tight situation, with that lopsided smile, your brown-grey eyes crinkling in the corners like you were squinting into a storm. It was a great schtick, funny until it wasn’t. Until I needed you to look me in the eye and say sorry properly. You frown-laughed, asked me what I was on about. I looked at you, thinking of that night, the two of us on the soft grass with the vodka swimming in our heads, your white hand picking my brown one up to point at the constellations, I wondered if I’d remembered it all wrong, whether you had really whispered hot in my ear, “Your skin is amazing.” I wondered if I’d got the rules wrong again, whether I should have known that in the morning you would roll away from me, light and easy. I should have known that what you really wanted was to go so far outside yourself that you could find your edges, begin to colour them in, see yourself in the things I wasn’t. And I lost myself, stuck forever on the damp grass, my head still spinning like a faraway galaxy. I realised then that constellations aren’t real. They’re just lines that men draw in the sky. Without you pointing the connections out, I didn’t know how to hold myself together. I considered touching you, lightly, on the elbow. I considered smiling wryly, rolling my eyes. I considered saying please-sorry-thankyou. I imagined us laughing, softly at first, then really hard, clutching our bellies, soundlessly pointing at each other. I imagined all that. But I couldn’t imagine what would come after. How I would move through the world, my hand heavy with the absence of yours. I couldn’t imagine that, so I floated away into the night sky, waiting for someone else to draw a line connecting me back to myself.