Something Else I Don't Understand

She said she didn’t understand why I don’t write poetry anymore. As if she were the cause. She didn’t believe that I couldn’t reduce what we’d put each other through to a few pretty sentences. And she didn’t seem to get that the poetry I wrote to my girlfriend at fourteen and fifteen and seventeen was the outpouring of myopic infatuation. Over the years, I explained, I’d grown weary of its melodrama. Instead I was seeking farsighted companionship.

She didn’t understand why I didn’t write her letters anymore. Like I did in those first weeks. She said it was because I stopped feeling passionate about her. But, really, how I felt didn’t fit on a page, and every time I tried the directness of a letter the result was fragmentary, like a jigsaw puzzle missing the center pieces.

That’s why I wrote stories and not poems or letters. It was all too complicated to explain. That’s what literature is for, I told her, for when you can’t explain it. But, for her, stories took too long. They lacked the immediacy of a sententious declaration. Once at a restaurant, to appease her, I wrote on a napkin: Why can't I just say I love you?
She shrugged and said, What does I love you even mean?
I understood. Those were words she’d use without a thought, getting off the phone or walking out the door.

You want a fairy tale, I told her. But fairy tales begin unreal, end unreal and have some great problem in between.