Turn On The Discovery Channel
Stop gambling with all the happiness I’ve been saving up. It’s gotta get us through the year. We’ve gotta use it to pay the electric bill of our bodies. I see your freckle (the one on the back of your neck that we call Dean), and raise you my heart. (We call it Crazy when it comes out to play.) It thump thump thumps out of my chest and into your hands. Touch it. Hold it. Close your eyes and solve it like a Rubik’s Cube. One of the ones with fourteen colours, ‘cause I’ve got more facets than a four-sided cube and you know it. Pull at its strings and tie them. Bunny ears, none of that loop-swoop-and-pull crap. I am a marionette, if you’ll have me that way.
But will you be around to hold me when it’s Shark Week again? (And again?) You know how I get about Great Whites and Whale Sharks. And whales, for that matter. And jellyfish. …And crabs. Lobsters. Sand. That’s why I’m afraid of the ocean and that’s why you resent me. I think. But you always hold me through Shark Week. Will you do it again? (And again?)
The only other time I ever loved someone, they left me shivering in the cold confines of my own arms. I was paying the bill for lack of body heat. They call it the “Lonely Bill.” It’s a lot like an electric bill, but it’s because you’re all alone. That bastard solved my cube in patterns. He tied my heart strings so damn tight I had to buy new laces. Damn double knots. He twisted my marionette wires and baby, you’re the one who untangled them. You’re also the one who holds me through Shark Week. And it’s always Shark Week.
