Bloodstains

There was a bloodstain on my mother's pillow the one she had when I was a kid in my parents' house the understuffed blue and white striped one. It was faded and the blood had turned brownish red. I remember seeing it and wondering how it got there. Did my mother's mouth bleed? Or her nose? Did she cry blood? I never asked her about it and until today it sat in my head, this thing that exists without acknowledgement a piece of me and it makes me realize how much of my existence has faded away like blood slowly oxidizing, the life of it evaporating/ leaving only the faded stain.

I was walking on 6th ave to grab some lunch when I saw a confrontation between a guy in a wheelchair and a black man. The guy in the wheelchair was large and had a ponytail and an English accent an the black man was in his 50's. The wheelchair was yelling about how the man had bumped into him and knocked him over. They were on each others' face. I walked by it but couldn't help but look back. It was escalating. I stopped. And then the black man spit in wheelchair's face and wheelchair swung at him. I stepped in I got between them and just kept saying walk away. A crowd formed. I was now a part of this thing. They kept circling each other. The black man spit again and the wheelchair called him a nigger. Another, bigger guy jumped in to help me break it up. I kept saying there is no settling this just walk away. And finally they did. Wheelchair followed me and caught up to me as I was walking down the street. We stood waiting for the walk sign. 'what kind of world is this when someone can knock over a guy in a wheelchair...' he was ranting. I looked at him. I think he was wearing make-up. 'I didn't go to Iraq and sustain this injury...' he kept on. But he was too old for Iraq. It didn't make sense. And I got the feeling maybe I'd been had.

She had had a surgery to remove a bunion just as we were breaking apart. I was always her protector so letting her go wounded was difficult, but my anger carried me through. I had wanted to be apart from her - or at least I thought I did - and I had one way or another orchestrated this moment. I didn't know the pain that waited for me, a pain I'd never known before and since. But at that moment, I wanted to hurt her.

She was such a little thing, so little that as we'd walk along after a rain I'd pick her up with one arm and carry her over a puddle without missing a beat. She was small but she was determined and when she was wild she was a force of nature. She could drink twice as much as me but the alcohol wouldn't deaden her, it would fuel the fire that was always burning inside her.

The fire would rage up and we would explode, fighting each other, hurting each other. At first I didn't know the hurt she carried. Meeting her family, they all looked at me as if I was saving her. I don't know where it started but I learned she had always been prone to episodes of dangerousness driven by feelings of betrayal when the world didn't line up like one of her fairy tales. As she got older and moved out on her own, she fashioned her life like Audrey Hepburn's character in Breakfast at Tiffany's. That's when I met her. It was a convincing act.

She lied to me the entire first year. Lied about where she was from, told me lies about her family, implied that she came from enormous wealth and that she was trying to escape it, that her grandmother was Persian royalty, that she had just dropped out of Pepperdine where all she managed to do was surf all day. In truth she was from Albuquerque, the daughter of a fireman and a real-estate agent. The truth was she'd gotten pregnant the first time she'd had sex. The truth was that she had a daughter who was given up for adoption. This truth haunted her.

When she confessed this all to me, I was relieved. I never believed her stories but I didn't know how to question them. I loved her. I was happy that she'd come clean.

She was such a little thing and I chose to protect her because I wanted someone to protect. I'd had my share of disappointments, too.

We lived happily for close to a year like that. But then the truth caught up to us.

Tonight as I lied in bed next to my wife, the clear memory of it came to me for the first time since it'd happened, the day she was moving out for the last time. I'd packed her boxes for her but I wasn't going to help her take them down. Instead, I listened as she and one of her friends lugged the boxes from the hall down six flights of stairs while I sat in my apartment. And once the last of it was taken down, I snuck down and watched from around the corner as she stood there with the boxes in the foyer of the building as her friend went to pull the van around. I watched as she limped away from me, her freshly operated-on foot wrapped in a cast. I watched as she leaned up against the wall and cried.