thirty-three days

On Christmas Eve, five weeks into dating my girlfriend,
I am in an oak-walled bar with wet plywood floors
and a cache of partygoers trying to get drunk
before last call.  I am a cliché, a country song:
I am crying into my beer in the corner because I have
simultaneously realized, accepted, and acknowledged
thirty-three days into the relationship that she and I are through;
however, I will keep her around for New Year’s Eve,
Valentine’s Day, and her birthday because finally I am not single
during the holidays and finally I can say my girlfriend and I
are going out for her birthday.  I have been significant, a member
of the couples’ club for just over a month and I am not ready
to rip up my membership card just yet.

After weeks of tripping over my girlfriend’s shoes,
her bookbag, her books and videos, and throwing
her dirty shirts and jeans across my bedroom in a huff,
I am done wondering why she isn’t here but her shit is.
I give up when I realize she was just waiting for me to get tired
of what her personal ad didn’t mention and take myself
to the bar, which is where I now mood swing from sad to angry
and switch from Corona to tequila.  I suck back salt, liquor and lime
while I feel sorry for the bar’s one tired waitress
and her beer-soaked Keds.  I burn through eight cigarettes
before I notice a Goodwill billboard that announces
When it’s over, it’s over, and though I asked for a sign
about this relationship, this public assertion of the end blindsides me.
Ice crackles like cellophane in the parking lot, and I take
my dumbfounded mouth home.  Salty and wet,
I need no audience.  In the morning, I dip into red felt,
stockpile lotions, books, thick socks, a color printer.  I brave face
my way through the morning, waiting for my girlfriend to call,
waiting to say It’s her – I’ll take this in the other room.

Finally, after hours of messages, she returns my call, promises
to come over.  The hole in her muffler announces her arrival
when she is still a block away.  She stomps up the wide cement stairs,
knocks snow from her boots and I pull her inside, laughing,
trying to avoid the December air.  Something in my heart surges
at the sight of her, and I bury my doubts, let her take me to the movies –
my girlfriend and I are spending Christmas night at the cinema –
the novel, scarf, and tin of chamomile she gives me sitting between us.

In the theatre, she and I thread together our fingers after the lights go down,
my free hand wrapped around the soda.  She plunks into the popcorn
until she is grease-soaked.  Back in my apartment, I turn up the heat
and watch her strip off her layers.  We attach at navel, thigh, breast,
and kneecap, and I wrap my arms around her, running my hands
through her thick hair.  I am not ready to say my girlfriend and I have broken up,
so I will sleep next to her, taste her mouth, and call her worthwhile
for another ninety days, knowing I should already be gone.