The things Truman said

You peel back enough layers of a person, I’m talking the fine hairs and the outer skin and then subcutaneous tissue, muscle to bone, you expose enough of that hollow cavity below the sternum to the atmosphere and you find some ugly truth, some thing that has gone unforgiven or that you can’t reconcile. That’s where we were, me standing with my wallet in hand with one shoe untied waiting for her to say don’t go from the couch. What kind of people were we is what I was thinking to myself, what kind of people need these theatrics to get by?

We stayed that way for a long time, long enough that there’s no point advancing the moment, both of us grown stubborn in the face of our own selfishness, which I guess let’s call that self-preservation. I got the feeling that this is the snapping off point, that whenever time started up again I would do something with some resonance.

In my head I ran through the reasons each of us was to blame. It came out about how I expected. Fruit flies traced lazy arcs around the sink. She said don’t you dare think I’ll chase you with a hard edge, the voice she reserved for talking to the manager. I tensed my hand around my car key, ready for nuclear war.