Husband socks

The hallway is where straggler clothing loiter before finding their way to the hamper. There’s no sense in overcoming this habit of disorganization; it just feel so natural to surrender pieces onto the hardwood as I strip for the shower. So there is always a smattering of clothing parallel to the bathroom, like tumble weeds made out of poly blends and cotton. Like old snow that turns ashen with each passing day. This time, when I round the corner, a small patch of electric blue screams from the floor and catches my eye. A lone athletic sock, wadded into a ball, leaning against the molding stares up at me. For reasons too slippery for my tongue, when my sight absorbed my domestic negligence my brain labels the carelessness with “my husband’s sock”.

What the hell is that?

Because that is not my husband’s sock. I have no husband. I have a lover who loans me socks when I show up to teach classes in his gym without any of my own. I have a friend who listens to the victories and insecurities engraved on my cells; a priest who offers absolution just by stomaching my self-indulgent confessions. I have a companion who compassionately feeds me dinner and volleys back inquiry about any subject under the sun. I have a soul mate who tongues my mouth and cunt with equally engaged passion; a comrade to fondle flesh with as a means of resurrecting god.

I have a rare thing, an ingenuous thing, a thing so difficult it shreds my soul bare.

But I do not have a husband and I never will. He is not my husband and he will never be.

Then why does my mind apply words with a complete disregard for their meaning? Why is that ball of black and blue “my husband sock’s”?

I want to tell you it’s because “husband’s socks” makes it easy. That you would immediately understand the significance of this relationship if I could summarize it with just one word. I want to be like everyone else in the universe and use a language that is succinct and fulfilling; a language capable of highlighting the importance and the need for protection of a relationship that stands singular to all else.

I want to tell you, that like everything else in my life, I wish it was easier. I wish I could make you understand the burdens of that come with mind. I wish I could just say he was my husband even if I’m not built to withstand the monotony of being a wife. Husband and wife aren’t titles can handle the gravity of our relentless honesty; they aren’t labels with enough elasticity for the feelings we inspire in each other. But still, I wish I could say husband and you would know that this is about a meeting of mind; the purpose behind evolution, the fluke of sheer luck that we have made it this far.

This is not about shared property and rigid gender roles. Not about limiting the range of our independent explorations. Not about grand gestures in front of a superficial audience just to prove we’ve lived and made uninspired noise.

But this is about sickness and health. This is until death do us part but understanding that vast time and spaces away from each other is not the same as death. This is about letting love move in the way that love sees most fit.

None of that makes it easy but so much of that makes it magical. I pick up his lone sock and inhale; it still smells so much like him even if I dragged it through 60 minutes of intense sweating. There is so much of him inside my head, woven in the never-ending prattle of my subconscious. This is not my husband’s sock but I wish for some way to explain that this sock defies too many physical laws. How the fuck did this sock get here in the first place?

There are 8,420 days between our birthdays and 5,317 miles between our birthplaces. We were incubated in nonconsecutive generations, seeped in vastly different culture. How did we ever manage to have a conversation, let alone share garments? And yet here is his sock sauntering up against my dirty laundry; weird evidence of love’s lack of concern about logical prerequisites for its unfettered manifestation. And here is more evidence amassed in unpredictable fashion, over weeks and months and tear-soaked years. Here are the bruises from his kisses sometimes violent undertows, turning yellow like overripe fruit, mottling my thighs. Here is the poetry scrapped from our gums after a million small moments of emotion jostled our individual souls bare. Here is a story encrypted into my maneuvering of my veins; an impetus swirling behind my blood’s flow. Here is him crying in my arms over love lost, over his broken vows for a woman who was once the reason he rose out of bed. Here is me coddling the most tender facets of his psyche, spoon-feeding him perspective and chicken soup. Here is he cradling my insecurities and salvaging the sharp edges of my bravery from a depressive monsoon that swears I am a bad mom. Here is us listening to music in the back of an outdoor café at 11 pm on a Wednesday; here is us laughing too loud in downpour while we pluck sushi from square plates.

Here is us when we are beautiful: naked, glowing, open. So much electricity in our salvia and in our syllables. Here is us as immortals, male and female, vulnerable and oscillating, one into the other. The meaning of everything in motion.

But here is us when we are brutal: sterile, insensitive, cold, so full of rage the only color in our universe is red. Here is us as demons, selfish and explosive. Here is me erupting rage when he permits his other lover too close to my force field. Here is him stubbornly resolute about not caring about the outcomes of his actions. Here is us submerged in metallic silence. Here is us creating hell on earth.

We’re capable of forfeiting reality and creating either fantastical extreme: heaven on a Tuesday afternoon, Hell rattling off its slumber at the most unexpected of places. In the upheaval of either universe, emotive thought dilutes my blood, oxygenates me as if for the first time. How did we get here? How does anybody ever get to either of these places when they still have these lumbering mortal feet?

It can be jarring at times, to have a love like that. To be worn down the demands of this love’s honesty and passion. But we persist, throughout all the endless reasons to cease the connection. It is not about the intercourse; it has always been about the discourse. There is something cyclical and essential in how we speak to each other; something divinely inspired that heals wounds that each of us has housed way before we ever met. There is something restorative about heading to heaven only to fall back down to hell. We do not catch each other. We do not make promises about paradise forever upheld between our flesh.

We just tell each other of the journey and wet each other’s skin with our laughing tears.

He is not my husband and I am not his wife. I am just a woman who lets him be himself and he offers me the exact same privilege in return. I have no insurance if this relationship tanks; you would never be able to offer condolences the way one would if there was a divorce. If this ends badly, I suspect the damage would be much more complicated than a divorce. We share part brain and part heart. It seems so much easier to split a bank account.

I guess when my brain slips and says “my husband’s sock”, what it’s really trying to say is: I wish it were simpler. I wish I could make you understand what the risks are and why we take them.

Sometimes, I wish I were simpler, that he was simpler. Maybe then there’d be a better label for his dirty sock.