Love Affair

You dragged the smoke through the crack of your lips. These actions, like any others, seemed simple, easily readable, yet, as always, were brilliantly contrived. You hated smoking and you missed the tube of chapstick you forgot on the subway.
You give me too many reasons to hate you. All of your actions are stunted, a wooden boy trying to imitate the flawlessness of humanity, your stiff joints and too smooth gesture of bringing your hand to brush the hair out of your muddled, obtusely ugly eyes.
Your book characters speak more to me than you do. We sit at the kitchen table, the floral print of the tablecloth a harsh reminder of the times when I threw myself into home decor hoping to find a panacea for the prison I willingly stepped into. I know, without a doubt, she was in my bathrobe last night and you served her coffee in the same chair I'm now sitting in. I can smell her sweat at the collar of my robe. There's the slight, delicate odor of decay. She's no longer so young, her cunt probably doesn't get half as wet as I used to. You'd press inside me and stretch the age from my limbs, slopping it off like stalks of wheat, whacking each grain like you disdainfully place words on a page. You emotionally stunted bastard.
She probably wears stilettos and has fat ankles. Her hair is puffy and overly sprayed with a 99-cent can of acrid chemicals. You serve her coffee in the morning with her mascara smudged all the way to her temples, her rouge harsh and out of place in the morning light, yet a constant reminder of how you've made a fool out of me. The clown you fuck deep into the night, her loose folds of skin encasing your ego in an impenetrable shell, your wife, a cold, incommunicable wasp.
The coffee is too acidic this morning. I pour more cream and watch as you smirk at my familiar action. You never knew how to make a proper cup of coffee. You shift, raising your shoulders to your ears. A tiny, insignificant chest hair pops out at the top of your robe, as if coming up for fresh air.
I never thought I'd marry a man with so much hair, but I was always glad, in a way, that I did. I would never look down and see a hairless, baby face that I could forgive. Your hair made you all the more abominable, all the more easy to hate. You exhaled, a timeless action you always used to collect your thoughts into one of your complicated, over-rationalized lies.
"I think I have a cold.

"You know where the thermometer is.

"I don't have a temperature.

"How would you know if you haven't checked?

"I just know. I don't feel hot.

"Then why do you think you have a cold?

"I just feel congested.

"You don't sound congested.

"I'm going to go see a doctor this afternoon.

"At what time?

"3.

"That's when you're supposed to pick up Matthew.

"You'll have to do it.

You sip from your mug, tilting your eyes to look at me over your glasses. The puppy dog look. That's how you got me and the last 2, you conniving...

"All right.

You lower your mug and smile, even going so far as to reach your hand across the table to touch the tops of my fingers. I play my own part, tilting my cup to show my compliance, swallowing the coffee too quickly, grimacing before blending it perfectly into a wide, contented smile. Our marriage is a game of puppetry, where the master has full rein to force a show of actions for which our eyes betray us.
My joints crack as I stand. Something that you used to speak of as if it were an endearing quality, until the noise became more frequent and more defined. Before it was almost like bubbles being released, tiny perks of noise, gently pressed out, but with age and my hatred of you, the cracks became harsh, gritty, strained; quick, brittle scrapes of bone like the raspy dimness of our only mediocre love affair.