After the last one (eight years, no children) you say: enough. There are too many rules to human love and every new partner changes them, anyway. Time for something else.\u00a0Apartment like a perch: glass, steel, sunlight, smog. Kick your heels off; go outside. The balcony is plenty big enough to hold the memorial you will build for this once-marriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is June, and the apartment is hot with treasures:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A strand of hair like steel wool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A syzygy of crumbs from what might have been a scone or a pizza slice or a profiterole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anything shining: a bracelet, an old key chain, a cufflink. A spangle of polyvinyl chloride.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you don\u2019t bind things together well they will fly away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
*<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Initially profligate in your collecting, you soon realize the true connoisseurship of the hardened nester: not just anything will do. Your earring, an old gift from him? Send it down. Not the hair (that\u2019s his, and you keep it). Keep no jewelry unless it was his. Certainly nothing of yours. The cufflink can stay. PVC you can keep. The sex you had seems connected to that smooth piece, and touching it is instant dopamine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Arrangement matters. There has to be room to squat. It\u2019s warm now, but it won\u2019t always be, and it’s already nearing the end of July. Brief moment of modesty when you think will I be seen if I am on the balcony in my nightclothes<\/em> but you are higher than everyone else, and if anyone could see you (a drone, a news helicopter, a free runner) they would only see a bird perched pinkly among a pile of objects that have no meaning at all, anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t know why you react how you react and it makes me feel bad.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n What do you think I am? you asked him. A time bomb?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some kind of bomb<\/em>, he said. I buy hair dye and you mistrust me. You mention your friends\u2019 kids and I feel like a failure.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Because it\u2019s new behavior. And I never said I wanted kids, you reply. If I wanted to give you a message I would give you a message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You judge me.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And I love you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t feel it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Assumptions, unsaid things, said things that wobble past the orbits of comprehension. Silly things. Too many rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you don\u2019t bind things together well they will fly away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n You haven\u2019t left the balcony in weeks and it\u2019s a more vital kind of living, this way, under sunlight and sunset and the shifting stage scenery of the clouds. Bottles of water and uncooked snacks arranged in a neat line at the boundary of inside and outside. Your reflection in the patio door: one, great bird. No misunderstanding in the fold of limbs or the curve of your eyes. No misunderstanding in your breathing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eight years. You don\u2019t expect people to change but they change all the time (the light is fading and it\u2019s time for the hunting thoughts to come out). Every day neurons in the brain die. Skin sloughs off. So does conviction. So does need. Want want want. You peck at the things you have gathered in your nest. A crumb is hard in your mouth, like a tooth itself. Who knows what it once was. The PVC is just PVC now and you no longer thrill in arousal when you clutch it. Suddenly you don\u2019t like the gleam of cufflink under starlight. So you throw it from the balcony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s entirely your prerogative to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is movement in the sky at sunrise at October\u2019s end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When birds migrate it is supposed to be beautiful, and ordered, and in formation. The house martins are different. They all collectively decide to leave and just leave,\u00a0<\/em>in freewheeling, black-spackled chaos. The sky is dusted with them\u2014and, among them, there is something larger. You stand up in the nest. A man is there in the sky. Naked, matching their flight effortlessly. Winglessly.\u00a0Maybe him, maybe not. If it is him he has lost weight. If it is him he has grown his hair longer and learned to break the laws of physics. If it is him it is impossible to tell, really, \u00a0because he is a stranger now, he is only a silhouette within that flock, against a sky that shrouds his features with the extravagance of daybreak, and then he is gone, and you are cold, anyway, standing like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You are ready to fly, too, but you decide to give him a head start: a few weeks to propel himself halfway around the globe, to new continents, on new currents of air. You suppose you can grant him that. Energy shifts in your muscles. Vital forces gather in your papery bones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So you give him that grace, and you hunker down, and you wait for the year to die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n __________<\/p>\n\n\n\n Phoenix Alexander (he\/him) is a queer, Greek-Cypriot author and curator of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in such venues as <\/em>Lightspeed, <\/em>F&SF,Escape Pod, and <\/em>kh\u014dr\u00e9\u014d. Find him on Bluesky @dracopoullos.bsky.social<\/a>, Instagram @alexander.phoenix<\/a>, and on his website, phoenixalexanderauthor.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"