~2014~
The sweat that was starting to build up in the pocket of my clammy neck roused me from the self-inflicted sedation I put myself in the night before. The heat building up inside me was nearly unbearable but I continued to lay in our bed for an hour with my eyes barely open, losing myself in the dancing streams of air and its particulate coming in through the vaulted window of our bedroom in mean streaks of blinding sun, and losing myself to a weighty sense of indiscernible guilt as I pushed through the throbbing in my head. Waking up con la cruda, with a hangover, was usually a cakewalk for me, and not because I was a frequent drinker and had some clever trick for it or anything. During the first few years of our marriage, my wife and I partied often and usually with close friends, with mellow moods mostly, but it was rare that we went out and drank in excess the way we had the night before at our anniversary celebration at The Rail, our preferred gay (not too much lesbian) wheretobe. Liquids, placebo, and patience were usually all I needed to snap out of it fast without underutilizing the day, which I hate doing even now but hated so much more in the beginning when our life was busy with travel, socials, political activism, our careers, but most of all one another. We never felt we had enough time together in those first years of our romance. We were consumed and so content in each other’s gaze, in each other’s touch. Súper enamoradas, my family would say of us, we were so very much in love and so into each other, it was apparent and sickening to everyone who saw us on any given day. We fell hard and kept it hard daily, we really did, beautifully enmeshed in ways I’ve always wanted to be after spending my life enmeshed in others in ways I didn’t. Amor Eterno, we would even say, we had eternal love.
That morning, as I was slowly waking up to a new day, there was something else other than party booze weighing me down in bed next to her, something of the night before that tasted so sour in my mind and had dented my trust and had me anguished that the wickedness of lies and deceit had infiltrated even what I believed was our perfect home and life. She was awake next to me, I knew by her deep, frustrated breathing I was at the mercy of just then because I thought she could have just as well been in the deep of her sleep and would wake up much later having forgotten everything of the night before, everything I had done and said.