She smiled, shyly, astonished a bit. She wasn’t condescending as she spoke; it was instead nearly devoid of inflection other than her natural cadence:
“No, you’re different.
You’re broken in the best possible way.
You’re the prizefighter, who doesn’t know what they’re fighting for,
Just undying affection,
Perfection.
Nonchalance inside chaos.
The bolt to which there is no screw,
So instead you start looking for something that’s broken.
But what are you fighting for?
You fasten yourself to the ropes,
The steady balance offered by their uneasy stretches,
Your knuckles brittle and hungry,
Equal parts delight and pain,
Where is your prize?
Why is your fist so filled with desire?
When it lands, will you know what you want?
The hardest part, acknowledging you’ll never get it right,
Is what keeps you standing,
While your head is spinning.
Don’t fall down, I’m counting on you now.
I’m counting on you to stay where no one can,
To be a man – but not in the literal sense,
Because all your balls have ever got you is pain and stupidity.
You see; that’s why you’re such a good prizefigher.
Because you have no idea what you’re trying to win.
It doesn’t matter.
It can’t,
Or what’s the use in the fight?”
As she trailed off, words spun around her in disarray, she wondered for a moment what it was she had just said, why she had said it, but quickly the sentences came back together in her mind and she understood them. She looked at me with joy and then sadness. She pressed herself up against me, I could feel her body and was filled with a sense of understanding, knowledge of her, of us – it dissolved immediately as she got up.
“I have to pee”
She stepped clumsily off the bench. I watched her, fixated, as she wandered to the bathroom. Some condensation fell from her drink, which she was holding in her left hand. Tequila and Orange juice.
A realization dawned on me as I watched her.
I looked down at my drink, left seven folded bills on the bar, got up and walked out.
Photo by Sadie Myers. Words by Joseph Ettinger.
