Would you watch my six?

It's not supposed to be this hard I tell myself after the conversation is over, phone is folded up neatly and tucked back into its case. The bile taste in my mouth sliding back down my throat, my cheeks burning just a little less. I. Feel. Empty.

He tells me that living out west is important, that so is family and the practice and again the casual interjection of transferring my certification and how I could be a cop anywhere and if he was important to me I'd be willing to make that compromise. And like a lion my voice storms out of my gut that moving to the other side of the country is not a compromise, hair standing up on the back of my neck. (When you were a kid, didn't your parents tell you to stay away from a dog that's been hit? That they're the most vicious?)

The anger comes in waves and after it's crested the little reason I have left was able to weakly analyze all the countless other words and syllables into a mental image of me buried by a huge pile of shit and him walking calmly away, clean finger pointing back. Damn you Pyrrhus and your fucked up need to have your point be made. Don't you know it's easier to just go downhill?

Ten or fifty minutes later the phone tells me that maybe there is a way for it all to be worked out and for no moving to be involved, no compromises of that kind, but that he needs to feel safe and that it's up to me. And like a bastard I piss out yeah like what, you need me to play the fucking game and be able to guess what you need me to do to make you feel safe.

And the phone. Says. Yeah.

Over the last year or so my patience has run out on me, the bastard, in search of a gentler life. My tolerance is waning, lord, and my belief in love is endangered. I can be hard and unkind and outspoken and by most things remain unaffected. I try to steel myself, to not let the pokes and jabs and disappointments penetrate my skin. The thing he doesn't get is that I have to be this way, in this circumstance, that I would never survive my job if I couldn't, and that I wouldn't trade any small piece of it for lily-white serenity and a sterile sense of happiness. Bob and Marianne taught us that life is beautiful because it can be so ugly.