I don’t know what to say, words clot on my tongue like curdled milk in a glass. How there’s never an easy answer. You, though, you spill your words out on the table, the way I did to my best friend not two hours before. How they drip down the leg and onto the tile at our feet. Your glass now half-empty, it’s the third I’ve seen fracture this month. How I didn’t know people chose not to ingest what’s gone bad. I learned late, the fact that not everyone stays when things sour. How you look at me the way I would’ve looked at her, had a thousand miles not hung in the air between us.

We think, Someone has to have a solution. How it would seem so, wouldn’t it? I think of that verse in Galatians, about the spiritual nature and the sinful nature being in conflict, so that you do not do what you want. How I never seem to do what I want, and even when I do, it doesn’t make much of a difference. I’ve started wearing a rubber band around my wrist, to make something of a difference. How you want to make a change and spill your words out again. I snap rubber to skin, once, twice. How you watch me. We call it aversion and therapy and mean the same thing.

How I didn’t know this was a choice. It’s one of fate’s cruelest ironies, that we can look back and see where we’ve gone wrong. How sometimes we look too much before we leap. It makes me a bad person to say I’m grateful for your problems because they let me forget my own. How we do not do what we want. We drink our sugared coffee at the table and swat flies from the remnants that stick to the glass. How I want to reach across the air that hangs between us. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking of something I learned from C.S. Lewis: “We are far too easily pleased.”