Dolphins

Sometimes I get so mad at myself for wasting almost a decade of my life on you, when I should have known from the start it would never work out because I’m an earth sign and you’re an air sign, and the only thing we ever had in common was our love for water. You being unable to swim is beside the point, really, because I never would have been comfortable with you seeing me with my hair all wet and plastered to my head like an ugly seal, so much so that I always made sure to lock the bathroom door when I took a shower and not emerge until I’d blow-dried my hair and put on foundation and lipstick—which doesn’t really count as being made-up, at least, according to Cosmopolitan Magazine. I read that in the February issue, which I only picked up because of the Valentine’s Day destination article that turned out to be useless because every place it listed was exotic and expensive, and you would never have been okay with us spending that much money, even though we both suffer from seasonal affective disorder, and looking back, I think a weekend trip to somewhere warm and tropical when New York was buried under three feet of snow might have saved our marriage. My best memories of us happened when we rented that shabby little converted trailer at the oceanside campground in South Carolina on a whim coming back from what would have been your sister’s wedding, except she called it off when she found out her fiancé had gotten drunk and gone to a strip joint the night before after he’d promised not to, which you thought was an overreaction, but I totally got where she was coming from. I remember how we walked on the beach for hours, and you bought me a silly floppy hat so my nose wouldn’t get sunburned, and when we saw the dolphins playing just offshore, you told me that dolphins were your spirit animal, and I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants. And then you told me dolphins mate for life—which I later found out was untrue, just like all the other lies you told me—but at the time it seemed so romantic, and now whenever I see a dolphin, I think of you, which is totally unfair.

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