Flip a switch and wait

We bonded most easily over hatred. We hated Becky, we hated anything to do with the word fusion, we hated the government, we hated ourselves. It was like junior high all over again, just the music was a little better and we drank coffee instead of Mountain Dew.

We would walk through parking lots with retro sunglasses on and just bitch and bitch until we got to the car. We weren’t fit for the world, it hated us as a matter of course, and we were going to kick with earnest futility at all the spiderwebs. This is how we justified making the faces our boss might make during sex. How we had a whole routine of noises to go along. Meanness suits the misfits.

One day while we were sitting on a coffee shop patio talking about reality television, which we only watched it so we could expend most of our mental capacity in complaining about it, I saw two birds hopping around a scrap of bagel, taking turns picking at the thing, you know how finches or whatever do with the bright and curious tweaks of the head. Something about those two dumb birds got right in under my skin and lived for a little bit. I told her I thought it was a pretty good scene, and she looked over her shoulder to see. She agreed, but she didn’t feel it violently like I did, and that got me full of wondering about what her love was like, if it was tender or subdued or an ocean or firecrackers or dying. I painfully wanted to know.