I Never Think About That

     "It's fine," she said.  "Really, I'm not mad."
     "It's not fine, I need to stop," he said.  "I keep doing this to you over and over and eventually you're just going to be done with it.  Be done with me."
     "I know you've been through a lot and you are getting better," she said.
     She looked at him as he sat, head bowed, fingers interlocked.  Even at an angle she could tell his eyes were focused on some place a great distance away; some place before "she" was part of "them."  The fibers of the silence were filled with water, giving it an unnatural density.  She became aware of the refrigerator humming in the background.  The seashell din of highway traffic a short distance away.  His lips stayed frozen, his brain fighting a thought.  She didn't know if he could ever break the stalemate.
     "I...I know in the moment...that I'm wrong.  That it's me that I'm angry with.  I see it coming.  But then I do it anyway.  I yell at you.  And then you go into your 'Bastion of innocence' mode that we both know is bullshit and we both know boils my blood and it all falls apart in front of me, like I'm sitting back and watching it happen in third person.  And in that moment I love you and I despise you more than any person on the planet, and I see all of the ugliness inside of me and know that you see it to, then I'm lost and scared and angry, furious, livid, all out of this consuming fear and this black void inside of my chest.  And it's like I'm just learning how to feel things all over again and all of the dials are turned up to ten and I can't turn them down or off because they're all turned to ten and where do you start?  I look at you in the middle of this and see that you're behind this armor that I've forced you into and I wonder how long it will be before you just stay in it full time.  I wonder how I could forget that you accumulated your own garbage over the years and that I'm poking old sores with a ripe new stick.  I wonder how much I look like your dad right now and how you can even look at me," he said.
     "I never think about that, I just think of her," she said.
     "It's not fucking about her," he said.
     The silence settled in again and they could both hear the howl of the tires from the freeway.  The noise of the rubber forcing the heavy metal rectangles forward toward the lights of the city buildings, glowing quaintly against the black and purple sky.