The Second Law of Thermodynamics

 When we passed the lesbian couple looking at breakfast bars, and the cute girl on the other side of them, and my daughter was scolding me from the passenger seat of the shopping cart and my face was a mask of patience, a mask cracked and possibly showing the anxiety biting the back of my neck or the scream I had been choking down, I thought to that grim audience who did not care for my existence, I'm sorry for doing this in public but I don't get to take a break for my collapse, I have to keep buying food for the kids and responding to their questions with quiet patience and all I can do is break and disintegrate inside which is why I look this way.

I didn't recognize the number so I was leery when I picked up, and in retrospect I was surprised at how easily she convinced me it was not a scam--that she really was here to serve me with papers from my wife's lawyer--so much so, that even when I got downstairs to receive them, and found the letter was open-faced and un-enveloped with every piece of our situation available for anyone to read, there in a woman's hands whom I'd never before seen in my life--so much so, I say, that I still thanked her.

Because my friend asked and because she insisted on presenting to me more and more outlandish and devastating scenarios of my collapse, my ruin, my eradication and homelessness and hopelessness and horrifying evisceration, I observed with no employment, no marriage, no community, aging--I thought about it and realized I don't know, I suppose, what it would take, or what it will take, or what it has taken already perhaps, to really break me: to make me whisper, "I can't take it anymore," and then, to be honest, I would not kill myself but I would turn my face to a wall and simply never rise again, not to eat or drink or shit or bleed or anything, I would just lay in that place until I died of all the idiotic blank inaction that brought me to that mental state to begin with, and the procrastination and unwitting laziness that broke me would then heal the world of me with nothing left but a corpse to take away.

All this behind my eyes, lodged somewhere behind my sinuses, as we passed the cheez-its and I told a four year old we didn't need them and she scowled at me and set up a complaint targeted to gain the attention of that couple and that girl and the sob in my throat around which I gingerly stepped to vocalize something soothing and appeasing while I pushed the cart towards milk, towards bread, towards the vegetables, towards home, towards sleep, towards some other day when some other troubles would grind and gnash and mulch these current horrors into soil.

December 2024