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Magic the Gathering Ad Disguised as a Discarded Draft of My Wedding Vows
Leah Mensch
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
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after Matthew Olzman & for Geramee Hensley
Ok, I’m weeping about the shape of the Rincon Mountains & how we thought briefly, we were moving to Ohio last year & all the love clutching at us here, in this place we once thought we’d leave as fast as we could. I’m driving home from the pharmacy on Speedway Boulevard (winner of the 1970 Life Magazine Ugliest Road In America award, and rightfully so), and the clouds are bleeding coral against the Circle K. At the light, I go to text you sky, but you have already texted me sky. I’m crying also about that scene from the end of Arrival, when Louise realizes time is not linear, and she can see the entire circumference of her life, that her daughter will get sick and her husband will leave her as a result, and she says to him, if you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things? I’m feeling disgustingly sentimental this week, I say, though I fear this is almost my chronic state now. I can feel my ribs cracking. I tell my friend Margo that sometimes I cry about how well she loves her daughter, and Margo says this is fine, that anyone who has ever thought seriously about ending their life may cry with as much tenderness as often as they wish & make it everyone’s problem. I don’t make the rules, though lately I’m unsure I was ever serious at all. Maybe I just forget the texture of those years or maybe I’ve been inducted into the club by way of adjacent early-20s psychiatric achievements. It’s like an honorary PhD for writing a smashing rap album or like how marrying me makes you, my beautiful Catholic Schoolboy, impossibly Jewish. Speaking of marriage, here’s an argument as to why I think ours will work: because you hate my favorite pants and waited three years to tell me. Because you bench press 300 & cut your pinkie finger (stitches needed) with a butter knife. Because we both have stomach issues but have made do with one bathroom. Because you write about grief but talk mostly about joy, and cooking, and sometimes farts. Once someone told me I was so lucky to be partnered with a writer because we must talk about writing all the time! Yesterday we did not talk about writing at all but discussed the 3 oz gold bar at Costco, and also, time. (Is “a month from June 30” July 30th or July 31st? One argument is numeric, the other is syntactic). Because once, we resorted to playing rock paper scissors to decide who had to be on top, and you always go paper first, and I always, somehow, still lose. Because you are impossibly gentle, and the most violent things I’ve ever heard you say are about people who drive like they have a branch up their ass & you remain silent when I have to shift into reverse during a U-Turn. Because you clean the crock pot when I’m too tired & won’t admit when you’re pity laughing at my jokes. Because you get out of bed to kiss me goodbye when I leave for a run. Because that one time you drank six Diet Dr. Peppers in a row (wife don’t need to know about soda, you said) & stayed up till 3 AM & I was so upset I wrote myself a note on the back of the Tucson Electric Power bill. I am never not afraid you’re going to die. And this is true. It consumes me, the way joy and sorrow and love all echo each other, some exploding star at the center of my life, which has become yours, too. And yeah, I am crying about Arrival again. The next day you sent me a photo of the pimple on your chin (did it look infected, you wanted to know) & a meme that lamented having a good partner is weird: what do you mean all I have to do is worry about them dying and what Magic deck they building next? & goddamn it, I thought. Maybe there really are no original experiences left. Tucson Electric Power makes a billing error so it turns out I actually do need that paper I defaced with my feelings. Dear Carl Philips, I too walked the plank backwards, so steadily I was sure I was not moving at all, but now my love & I are digging through the recycling on a 108 degree day and I know what they’re going to say—stop recycling our bills, or at least tear them up first! But instead, they just start laughing.
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This essay started as a list of things I cry (tenderly) about on the way to work, to which Geramee said, "you know there's a word limit, right?" The other half of this essay was a love poem I started writing after reading Matthew Olzmann's Mezzanines. I couldn't find my way to the end of either project, until I realized they fit together.
Leah Mensch loves her spouse and Kate Braverman. She occasionally throws away important things, but not on purpose. More, if you dare, at leahmensch.com.
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