Today I thought about burning the tapestry we bought together, but that required fire and a pit and piling wood together like a tent, and I realized that the small wavering thought of you wasn’t worth all the effort.

I get it now, I’m driving home at 2 in the morning, listening to a song that sounds like sleeping in the back seat of a pickup truck while the music hits the cracked windows. I’m folding laundry, and there’s the smell of evenings spent at the laundromat with my dad and sister when I was a kid. The sight of an empty fridge, the taste of cereal with water for breakfast.

And In all of this, I realize that there was probably never a moment when you wondered where your next meal was coming from. With your heated floors and financial security. Me, a silly kid of merely 18, head over heals in love with you, couldn’t have been bothered to think of cultural divide, or how our childhoods never made sense to one another.
So I think of all this and I get it. She’s better for you. She makes more sense to you. Both of you growing up within 10 blocks from each-other. Neither of you followed around a store that you grew up around the corner from, because once gentrified, brown becomes suspicious. Neither of your parents freshly 18 and vomiting prayers as they walked home from work, through places that without a guardian angel, you could end up in pieces or splattered on the floor. Neither of you were nine, and filled with panic at the thought of your dad bussing home from working nights at a casino. Cleaning floors or windows or toilets. I bet you never saw your dad cry with anger and swallow humiliation watching all those people gambling away money he could of used to patch up the cracks in the walls of that one bedroom “apartment”.

You make sense together.
I tried so hard to make you understand me, and see me.
I took you to my roots and you scrunched up your nose at them.
I should have known. When you refused to delve in my culture and instead bought pre packaged noodles.

So yeah, when I think of you guys together, at home spooning on a couch or bickering over dishes, I get it. It doesn’t hurt. It just makes sense.