SOULMATES: LA MEDIA NARANJA

You have passed into your post-menopause stage. Your youthful beauty is gone, never to return. You will soon be old and, sooner than you think, you will be dead. Despite the love your family and friends feel for you, you will be quickly forgotten. 

You could have published a book, or many books, but you chose to read rather than write. Your voice, the voice that once whispered sweet nothings into my ear, will be lost forever. You could have made the effort to preserve it with words, but you chose not to, just like you chose not to preserve our marriage. 

Our daughter has shown me recent photos of you. Your once sensuous body has lost its form. You resemble an ice cream cone melting on a summer's day. When I first knew you, your tits hung to your waist after having three kids with your first two husbands. I could both eat your pussy and suck on your nipples at the same time. We had our share of exciting escapades. If I asked for lenience and kissed your feet, would I encounter your nipples touching your toes? 

Bitterness flows ceaselessly from me. The scars rise like ropes from my skin and there are wounds that never stop bleeding. I am as hopeless as a hemophiliac. I never loved one woman more than I loved you and, yet, I never hated one woman more than I hated you. The animal in me could never accept the way you so easily gave yourself to others. 

We thought we had something in the beginning, but we learned that our iniquitous karma had brought us together, subjecting us to an endless torture in order to pay for past sins. In my worst episodes I must deal with the guilt that I wronged you. 

I was a brand new start and you embarked on this fresh beginning with the confidence that you had finally met your soulmate, but I could never erase from my mind that this woman whom I adored had been passed around like a bottle of whiskey among a bunch of good ol' boys on a hunting trip telling tales about your tail that produced more heat than the campfire they surrounded. 

You tried to do all the right things, all the little things that make a relationship special, but I could never pardon you and an unquenchable fire burned in me until it burst into an-all consuming conflagration. I decided to punish you by cheating on you. When you discovered that I was being unfaithful after enduring a series of venereal diseases, you couldn't take anymore and you wrecked your vengeance by cheating on me. 

Imagining your vagina filled with another man's sperm was too much for my disconsolate spirit. You smelled like rotten fish. I became the writer you never became and in my prose and poems you discovered that I despised you. You found yourself standing at the edge of the abyss with me, in a drunken fury, taunting you. You pushed me into the pitiless depths, turned around and sought refuge as you struggled with the dreadful reality that you had failed again. 

I will never recover from that chilling stare as we looked at each other for the last time. I knew then that you would rather gouge out your eyes than ever see my face again. 

It has been a few years now. You have suffered through several deaths that have gutted you. You have uprooted yourself and moved to another city. To your credit, you are a fighter who has not given up hope. I recall that big smile that once greeted me with optimism, but you can't help but recognize that your present state isn't the future you envisioned. You are not living the American dream in a country club with a happy husband and adoring grandkids, grilling fajitas and watching the Cowboys play, laughter the loving scene's sound track. 

As I sit in an apartment that probably isn't much different than yours, I'm sure you have found someone who is wining and dining you as well as fucking the shit out of you. You could never resist sex, damn the consequences! You don't stun men as you did in your younger days, but there are those who won't shun you because there is a fading beauty and a genial personality that will more than fulfill a lonely suitor. 

I, sadly, will never absolve you as much as I would like to because there were the joyful instances that I wish I could relive with you. But I have no doubt that you will have the ultimate revenge. When I am dying and minutes before I expire, you will reappear and crucify me with that baleful glare from which there will be no resurrection.