The Atomic Weight of Love

Acknowledgments
Writing is an intensely solitary endeavor, but a story isn’t truly heard until many hands have held it

Of course women are flighty, I thought. We have more predators than men; we have to operate constantly with greater wariness. Women alone in parking lots can be singled out, mugged, or worse. Our own mates can beat us, kill us.

“You didn’t offend me, although you may offend your professor. But, Meridian, if you really want to write, if you really want to speak through your writing, to communicate anything of value, anything worth saying—well, you have to be fearless. Sometimes, to get people to think, you have to offend, get them riled up. My advice is don’t anticipate what people will or will not think about what you’ve said, how it might alter their perspective of you.”

This time I raised my voice: “I’m telling you exactly what someone should have told me. To set my career, not to give it up for some man, for anyone. Don’t you see that? I only wish someone had loved me that much.”

He would grow tired of me or simply leave to return to school. As for me, I would return to . . . what? I couldn’t go back to my former life; it no longer existed.

2. Because legend dictates that if the captive ravens at the Tower of London ever leave the Tower the British Empire will crumble, the Tower’s ravens’ wings are clipped.

I saw the little boy in him—the part not lost to the war—whose early passions had framed who he would be, how he would be in the world. He was an only child like me, a loner playing in solitude in the high grasses of his parents’ ranch, turning rocks in his grubby, scabbed hands, puzzling over remnants of stars embedded in mundane rock.

Clay should have known then to run, fast and far—from me, from Alden, from us. We were toxic, worse than any radioactive dump. We were sick together, so long sick together.

And finally Alden, meeting him as an idolizing student, morphing into banality. I didn’t complain about Alden or disparage him—I’d promised myself I’d never do that, as if somehow that were a greater sin than betrayal of him with another man. What I said was that relationships die a slow, incremental death of boredom, resentment, and lassitude.

Crows do not take each other for granted.