Loved One

by Aisha Muharrar

I didn’t know any guys who liked anything done by a woman as much as they liked something done by a man.

His death, in its banality, was miraculous.

Then the burial. It was wretched. They actually put him in the ground.

Now that I’d returned to this state, I saw that I’d romanticized being a beginner.

Some men need that. They can’t access an emotion without their handy female cipher.

“Rose gold is death.”

A prayer for the rejected: Oh if ye be noble and true, may ye be blessed with running into the boy who dumped you after he’s had a terrible haircut.

They were young and wasting time, and I immediately hated them.

He rolled his eyes but remained silent, robbing me of what I thought might be an opportunity for us to use the word heteronormative in casual adult conversation, the secret goal of all liberal arts students who graduated between 2005 and 2010.

No one falls in love in LA.”

I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to be around other people. There was some kind of impossible divide between me and the world.

I wasn’t worried about being single forever. I was worried about feeling this lonely forever.

“No, I’m not really into astrology,” I said. A statement that—for an LA woman to make—was akin to Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door.

Oh yes, there are many ways to cry. I learned them all.

Grief was a large spectrum on a microscopic scale, and from where Caroline was standing, she could not see the gulf between better and—I don’t know—done? Healed?

Even though death happens all the time, no one could ever be a natural at this.