Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

Even as you grow, even as your heart evolves like the spindle cells of the humpback whales that have been evolving for years, you will wonder which things are true. The love, or the stories, or none, or both. Your research is ongoing.

We don’t want to admit the sad things, because it makes us sad.

tells me the things that have hurt him: He says I never really need him. That I don’t let him need me. That I’m harsh like the wind and I say things that make him think that I might never really love him, or perhaps it’s that I don’t say anything at all. Says he’s felt lonely, and we try to decipher the difference between lonely and alone. Sometimes, he wishes things were simple, he says, but I think what he means is that he wishes I was easier to love.

There is the smell in his beard of sea, of past, of love, of hate, and the edges of his hands are cracked cold with rips and scabs. I tell him I missed him.

I rush to the post office the next day. I unlock the small PO box, and it’s packed full of postcards and letters, all smashed together like a small earthquake must have shaken them into one big mass. I can’t peel them apart fast enough—he’s written to me on pieces of scrap paper, postcards, takeout menus. He’s mailed them from cities in Mexico, and there are a thousand sorries, a thousand love letters, a thousand reasons to love him again. There have been the times he tells me he loves me, but here is the proof that I can keep forever. I can highlight the lines and shout them at him during a fight, or sing the words to myself again and again. I try not to seep open and let it all out right there on the floor of the post office.

He’ll tell you not to plug your nose, that it’s rude, and then he will explain the process of a whale rotting. How it will become nothing and, also, part of everything.