Getting unstuck

There was something beautiful in our destruction. The slow changes that happened overtime, invisible in the seconds and minutes, but observation of two time points spread out far enough apart from each other showed a steady gradual decline.

In our desperation to have something we thought that should have been in marriage, the laugh lines we gave each other around the eyes, quick glances that could piece together an entire day of one shit thing after another in less than five seconds, intimacy of the dips and curves of the body that, we imagined, no one else could possibly have interest in. We had a similar view of how things should have been and This is Shit.

Dana grew up dreaming of eruptions, anything ranging from a small puff of gas equivalent to those girls who sneeze like mice to monstrous plumes of liquid earth and rolling curling pulverized earth. She obsessively watched the geology programs on the Discovery channel, had the times and days programmed into her life as regularly as her period and her need to eat every four hours. Clock work.

She loved to watch the slow advance of silvered tongued of lava tracing drainage paths down the mountain side. Striations in the earth caused by glacial movement made her shudder. These grooves in the new world matched these ones thousands of miles away in India.

And so, the earth that was constantly moving, ripping itself apart at its seams, had at one time been whole. A solid mass of land.

“This is a metaphor for all of life,” Dana had said during a class presentation, complete with beautiful overheads gleaned from the USGS and other reputable associations. “We are all broken up, drifting around in pieces. We constantly look for evidence to see how once we were whole. To make sure this isn’t just a dream.”

It was only natural that she married a geologist. Her college geology teacher, in fact. Their union caused a mixture of mouth gaping appall and shrugging shoulders. It was natural. She was obsessed with geology as it related to the extension of human experience and he was obsessed with geology period.

The had clicked over a student conference about her presentation and final paper.

“I want to talk about continental drift and subduction,” Dana said with her eyebrows pinched together and her eyes narrowed. She had the whole thing mapped out already and was irritated by the distraction of the student conference.

“Tell me more,” he said. He leaned back in his chair, he happened to look cool and interested, twirling his silver pen between his fingers. His hair flopped around on his head and the curls clumped together from the salt water and sand. He wore t-shirts with clever geology slogans and khaki pants. He looked like he was ready to go on a camping trip or had just returned from one.

Students thought he was cool. Faculty thought he was cool, but more from a lack of self consciousness than anything else.

Dana opened her mouth to start explaining more of the project, but he stopped her. “Wait, this isn’t going to be a historical piece, is it?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly. She started shuffling the pages of research material she had put together.

“Geology is a process Dana, it is the active process of a living planet. History is important for determining patterns of behavior but it doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s happening right now.” He had tilted forward in his chair and leaned towards her, seeing her slumped shoulders and her slack-faced gaze as she looked through the book’s worth of material she had copied and printed out.

He smelled like SexWax and the sea. Dana looked up at him and wondered if he had a surf board in his car, what kind of car did he have, did he live near the ocean where he could just slide out of bed into his suit and slush through the sand, thinking the whole time about erosion and where those tiny fragments of granite and quartz came from.

His office was small, concrete, but had a hand woven rug and dozens of pictures of him with friends, colleagues and family. He never used the overhead light and yelled at the people who turned it on. Sometimes it smelled like cinnamon.