Our love affair was sometimes a wrestling match

We fell into it then, a cluster of swinging fists like mosquitos hovering at the edge of the campfire at dusk. Words spit from our lips like sour mouthfuls of stale tobacco, black at the edges and bereft of joy. Later on they’d say it started with a glance; one of us looked at the other the wrong way and the mercury lurched toward the upper degrees, but you and I know this trouble was born far earlier, out of the piss and misery and loneliness in the hearts of each of us on our own time. Since then there’s a streak of brown blood on the sleeve of my shirt; no way of knowing whether it was yours or mine, and tonight I scrubbed at it again, but that stain just don’t want to come loose.