Like Fire, You Have Me.

She strides into our shared office. A paper napkin on my desk quivers, moved by the wake of her frigid storm. From the shoulders of her thin petite frame she noisily offloads onto her desk a black Coach pocketbook and a leather workbag, both barely holding back an inner tide of jumbled papers. She says nothing, and keeps her back to me.

The smell of her perfume and various leathers follows her like the train of a monarch’s long elegant gown, filling my head with awareness of her presence. We haven’t talked to each other in a week. I turn to look at her in this, one of many extraordinary moments, and greet her in the most ordinary way. The way normal, disinterested people greet each other.

“Good morning.” She doesn’t turn around.

“Hey,” she replies. Busy. Careless. Indifferent. She shuffles through papers. The picture of everyday mendacity.

Understanding the message not delivered through her one word, I repent. Retreating into my work, I hunch over an ergonomic keyboard and feign interest in the binary characters displayed on a humming monitor. The long fluorescent bulbs overhead flicker and buzz momentarily, apparently uncomfortable with the atmosphere we have created in their harsh false light. Purposefully, I lose myself in my universe of multitudinous chaotically-organized papers. I am a sun. These, my satellites. This, the only world I am concerned with.

I feel no anger. I harbor no ill will. I wish her no specific harm. She sits with her back to me not four feet away, the distance between us measured in light-years.

Yet I am content with my position in this dance of desperation.

Through the course of the morning I shine on her, warm her. This is not something I intend. It is merely a natural phenomenon. We cannot avoid each other.

We feel the pull of unseen forces. We are engaged in a delicate balance between resistance and embrace. Gravity. Magnetism. Electricity.

Eventually, she turns to me from her avoidance, smiles nervously, fearfully, and ventures a question. “Did I ever tell you about my new ‘friend’?”

She means her new flame. Her heart’s new desire. Fresh fire. The scourge of Prometheus. Consuming passion. Eradicator. Cleansing inexorable force.

“No,” I respond. “You never did.”

“Well you never asked,” she says. She wants to tell me about him. She wants me to show interest in her life. She longs to be a conduit for electric pulsation again. She is sad, reaching out. For connectedness. For warmth. For life.

“Very perceptive of you,” I say. “I never asked.”

She pulls air deeply into her lungs, and then releases it heavily. A typical human groan uttered under the weight of crushing emotional burden, a crucible.

We are bodies wrestling. For control, for reason. Our cosmos a twelve-by-twelve office with three computer stations, two full bookshelves, two large desks, and bulletin boards with affixed memos, pictures of our children, and abstract artwork formed by small sticky hands.

“…And the reason I never asked is because I don’t want to know,” I continue. “I already know.”

She turns back to her desk, reproved. Hurt.

We are nothing. We are everything. We are life. We are death. We are blessing and cursing. Opposing poles. Attracting, repelling.

Like fire she has me. Like violence I have her.

I am a sun. She is a moon. I bring her warm light, and I arrange eclipsing darkness.

We hate each other.

We love each other.

~ Witt