catelin

1.
She irritates me. She is like a child, with her petulant demands for attention and insistence at having the world roll under her feet according to her desires. She stands at the door for five minutes, fuming when I finally hear her and open it. I ask her why she did not use her key. She's had a key for months.

"I could not find it," she snaps. I look at the half-dozen keys on the ring and smile to myself, realizing that I have been opening the door far too often.

2.
I paint and paint, sweat trickling down between my breasts, sticking my shirt to me like papier mache. The music is loud and I keep working in the heat. I am alone. The house is a mess. The boys are gone for a few weeks, giving me a chance to feel what it is like to be without them. It's a small taste of what my life might be like if they had never been here and I am unsettled by how much I miss them. It is a physical pain, to be a mother. My canvas and brush are blue, and I imagine the boys laughing together and diving into blue water, two little fish under the watchful eye of their grandparents.

3.
We sit at the table and exchange stories. He is younger than me by almost a dozen years, something that distracts me even as I focus on his softly accented words. I've had a parade of suitors lately, all of them very earnest and interesting. I think to myself that I have become one of those eccentric middle-aged women who is charming in her own peculiar sort of way. Still, the opportunities for companionship have done little to lessen my preference for spending much of my time alone, tending to my gardens or working on any other number of solo projects I have brewing. A friend once told me that I reminded him of an old Joni Mitchell song.

She will love them when she sees them
They will lose her if they follow
And she only means to please them
And her heart is full and hollow
Like a cactus tree...

I watch him stir his coffee and he smiles at me. We dance in the shower at midnight as if it were the Trevi fountain.