She finished all of the plans for our wedding in the summer. The flowers, the guest list, the reception hall, the outfits. The figurines that sit atop the cake that she still has to phone order in a month. They’re out of stock right now. That’s how banal she is. She can’t find anything else to do with her time between balancing checkbooks and taking a night class. It’s biology. She wanted to take it because said she wanted to become a rich scientist when she was younger. What kind of childhood dream is that? Who thinks about salary at that age?
      I just remember I sighed heavily when she told me that and I never bothered to ask what kind because I could care less and she would drag it on forever with pitiful reasons and flow charts demonstrating how well she would be suited for the job. I’m in detention all over again. Except I run out of chalk and I can’t fall asleep. So instead of writing my punishment a thousand times we create coition, instead.
      I remember hearing and not really learning certain things about symbiotic relationships in high school. Its either both partners are beneficial to the other one, one is beneficial and the other isn’t harmed or one is beneficial at the expense of the other. Kind of like termites to trees. Parasites to hosts. And hear I am thinking of how she sucks me away with her everything that is just pounds and flesh of trite and vapid unity. I really feel like she deflated me more with everything she did to me. For me.
      Her words. Conversation.
      Her personality. Uninteresting.
      We got married in the drift of winter. It blistered lifelessness and of course we had a traditional wedding in a chapel with a sermon. She had a tangerine white dress with a veil that sort of hid her face. I had the same color tie hidden behind my charcoal suit. It looked like I should have been playing in front of an audience behind a piano reciting something Beethoven or Mozart had already composed many years before I met her.
      Everyone there clapped when the priest told us that we could now kiss. She didn’t use her tongue. I wanted to refuse to open my eyes after it. Someone’s relative got too drunk at the reception and the same kids in every dream scream when we have the dance floor to ourselves and whisper ‘I love you’ so no else can hear. They just see it when we can’t stop looking at each other during the slow dance. Of course she says it first. Of course I mumble it back.
      I remember thinking “I’m going to get old with this woman.”
      I only remember the for worse in “for the better or for worse.” The sickness in the “sickness and in health.”
      I wanted to get a fatal infection on our honeymoon in Alaska. Of course it’s somewhere frigid. Something frozen solid together like us. We’re a melting iceberg. It’ll take forty five million years to get to the size of an ice cube. It’ll take the same amount of time for me to admit I have significant feelings, other than “this one will do”, for my wife. And I couldn’t have picked someone more worn and unoriginal. I guess she just beats the alternative. I know she loves me. It flakes off her chapped lips when she presses them together and leans over and smacks a kiss onto mine.
      She asks me to have sex on our honeymoon. I decline because I say I feel nauseous from the dinner we just finished.
      I keep thinking “I’m going to have a lifetime to have sex with her. Why waste the first and only good one tonight?”
      I keep saying to her “besides, it’s really fucking cold outside” when she asks me why and retorts that I don’t love her anymore. Anymore? We’ve barely been married a day and I’m already feeling like I have to vomit on her face to keep the tears from hitting the carpet of the log cabin we rented for the week. The fireplace crackles and I keep saying “it’s not you honey, its just really fucking cold outside.” She begs me and of course I submit. I don’t want to upset her on our honeymoon. Besides, I keep saying to myself “You have the rest of your life to apologize.”
      Finish this and get warm.

she)(hey you
he)(yeah
she)(im really happy we finally got married
he)(yeah
she)(i love you with all my heart
he)(yeah sure me too

      Somewhere on my mild and numbing journey to climax I imagine myself as a young kid playing Marco Polo in a secret lake with a bunch of other neighborhood adolescents during a booming lightning storm. No one’s parents are around to scold us and everyone’s hair is sopping wet.

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