Notes From A Reluctant Love Nest

Day 17. What To Do When Someone Tells You You Have A Significant Heart Murmur. Take the money out of the sock drawer and run! Leave this country of cowards and conservatives behind! Go forth naked in the shivering dawn, south across less spoilt borders. Go live out your last days on a daily allowance of fruit and fresh fish and potent herbs from the curanderos. Stifle your murmuring heart in the company of an indigenous bride and an adopted family and live out your days in rectitude and quiet contemplation. Go! Go like Gaugin, like Rimbaud, like Papillion. Go! Like Bowles, like Burroughs. Go, where civilization meddles less in the affairs of men!

Day 10. What Happens When the Knockout Punch Goes Wide Right I did it. I got ripped on wine and let her have it. I was rotten. I don't love you, I said. I don't even know if I want to know you in six months, let alone this. How can you go on? I even accused her of trying to get pregnant. I know you put it up there, I said, On those trips to the bathroom right after. I even caught you in bed rubbing it around down there under the sheets. I did too. I wasn't making it up. She rubbed it all right but it's hard to say where in the dark when I'm rolled off on my back trying to catch my breath. I screamed, I yelled, I cursed. I said horrible things against her person. I checked the call timer on my cell the next morning and indeed I went on for quite a while, almost an hour. I don't know how I left it either.

Day 12. Standing in the Supermarket Queue Behind April and Destiny. You know, the public really lets me down every time. I've been trying lately, of course, to open myself up. I find myself staring at parents, mothers, fathers my age, old couples, little children, babies going by in strollers and bjorns, etc. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I figure if there's something I need, I'll recognize it. I get a lot of empty smiles in return and sometimes I lock horns with the little devils and there's a moment. That happened the other day at the Jons market, standing in the line behind10 month old twins. One of them, the one blithely referred to as April, was stuffing her fat cheeks full of her stubby hands, while clinging to the bosom of her mother or her aunt I couldn't tell the two women apart. The other one - and I'm using their real names here that I overheard - Destiny, could barely hold her head up. Something was clearly wrong. Her eyes were dull and nothing grabbed her attention. She wasn't nursing or sleeping, she just hung there, suspended on the shelf of the other woman's breasts, neither smiling or crying. I looked at her caretakers, whose eyes were also dull and limned with heavy eyeliner. Each of them was very overweight, dangerously so for such young women I would think and in neither case was it child rearing fat. I listened to them speak about the prepackaged, salt laden food substitutes they were buying. Then they talked about the soap opera that afternoon while they swayed in the line like lowing cattle. I wandered into the future with them: bad health, bad habits, bad TV, bad diet, bad grammar, kids with bad porn actress names and bad boyfriends and suddenly I found myself having to hold back a tear because they were so beautiful, so stupidly unaware and beautiful, that I almost couldn't help myself.

Day 14. Playing Tag With My Sperm, Or How I Begrudgingly Became A Father. An unnamed someone listened to her pros and cons the other day, the same ones I listed a while back, and told her that the reasons to not have a child were selfish and the reasons for having a child were selfless. Didn't I see that on a greeting card somewhere, or read it on a Baptist handout? She actually offered it up as a kernel of wisdom, like it would appeal to me because of its cunning.

Day 2. What We Don't Know and How We Are Blessed By It. A long day ago I started this journal. If you're wondering where I got the 'Love Nest' part of the title, it's my pet name for her. But today it's the word preggers that keeps going through my head and I write it down just to see how I feel about it. I don't like it. It seems like there should be two 'g''s, just to keep the egg part in the middle, but I'm going to drop it altogether.

Day 5. A Big Day in the Trenches. We get nowhere. Our two ends never meet. If I loved her more... She saw the scan at the hospital. She saw it there, the size of a peanut or a walnut, she said and it was right where it was supposed to be. Now today the doctor called and said the rest of the test looked good. Friday another round, to test hormone gains or decreases. Pluses or minuses again. Yeses or nos.

Day 8. Replay of Previous Sunday, Replete with Pittsburgh Loss Vs. Denver Day 9. I'm Still Here. She's calling off the hook this morning on her way to work. So nice to turn the ringer off. She can call all she wants, and email too. She's worried that I've skipped out, or worse. I was out of it when she called last night. Half asleep, I answered the phone reluctantly. I let her think whatever she wants. I sounded funny, she said. She's knows I'm depressed. She asks me if I've done anything stupid. Not lately, I said.