If I told you that I knew nothing, could you let me be?

Almost out of spite for your attachment to an idol modeled on me I said

“I just want to get through this phase of egotism. I want to negate all desire, all attachment in myself, so I can give the choice back to G-d”. There’s nothing a once-lover, a would-be lover, or worse yet, a current lover recoils from more than the invocation of god and a proposed spiritual negation of self in the voice of the loved one.

“it’s like you’re trying to cancel out everything we had” you said- “that we have- because you don’t want to think about it, or you don’t want to try…I don’t know”

My response was pure cruelty. I said it because I wanted you to suffer the separation. I thought it would do you good.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with “us”. It doesn’t, actually, have anything to do with YOU. Or with ME, for that matter. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain.”

It must have seemed outrageous, because we were in a red Honda on route 2. Shortly after that exchange of words we went through the tolls and I had to ask you to get seventy-five cents out of the change dish. You got it out of your hello kitty wallet instead. The toll collector, an obviously bored and jaded kid a couple years younger than us, did not tell me to have a nice day. He didn’t even look up from his magazine. But I saw you smile at him, trying to catch his eye, trying to establish affirmation (of yourself? Of the other person? Of fundamental goodness in the tolls of the modern village?), As I’ve seen you do so many times before.

I was so naive when I thought of you as a body. I remember the first time we kissed, the first time I touched your breasts, the first time I caressed you. I remember everything going sour after that. I remember becoming the only person you never looked at the way you had just looked at the toll collector. With me your eyes began to do something very private, as if they were pulling and prodding me, searching for specific nerves in me and tapping on them slightly, demanding entrance to every room, and insisting on locking the doors after you.

So I didn’t want to touch you anymore. I wanted to go back to the days before I’d ever touched you, so you could love me again, indifferently, the way you loved everyone else.