Weapons

I won’t let my husband keep a gun, so on his side of the bed, there’s a knife in the condom drawer, a baseball bat within reach of his pillow, and a hammer on the bedside table. For a while, I had thought that the hammer had been mistakenly left behind when we hung pictures, but after I put it away, it returns. Last night, we went into the city to meet people that I don’t know and didn’t like, and I drank two martinis because that’s what the woman was having, and then I fell asleep on the velvet couch, so the bouncer kicked us out (it was a fancy place) because he “can’t have people passed out in his establishment.” On the way to the subway, I think my husband said he didn’t want to be married to me, or maybe I said I didn’t want to be married to him, but by the time we got on the train, one or the other of us apologized, and he let me sleep on his shoulder on the way home. In her martini, the woman had olives, and in mine was a twist. The woman kept talking about passion; her four kids were her greatest passion, she said, but also her thriving real estate business, that was her passion, too. I wondered if I have been wrongly defining passion and maybe I muttered something about poetry before nodding off. It strikes me now how delightful it would be if the bouncer did let people pass out in his establishment. We could all drape our bodies over the beautiful couches, close our eyes, and let our breath move in and out of our mouths. Maybe I would wake up in the midst of it, take a photo with my phone; or, maybe I would just keep sleeping, watching dreams come and go, the images almost as real as the ones in this life.