For You I’d Bleed Myself Dry - I know you love me, & I love you.
The scent of her lingers, on the fingertips and lips. Mo Chroi sits beside me, hair in ponytails, wearing the red shirt of her trade. I am driving her to work, her left hand clasping my right. The CD player plays ‘Parachutes.’ She is digging through the car. “I need another pen,” she says. Mo Chroi and I have been dancing around what should be obvious to either of us for some time now, and indeed it seems plain: we are over. But we’ve said goodbye too many times to one another, wished one another well and farewell too often, for any one to have the finality it was intended. I’d said it again three nights ago. She said it again today. But we are both still flushed from the quick sex we shared in the bathroom of the house she’s staying at. She looks at me, silently. I take my eyes off the road for a moment, and stare into hers. - We both know we’re not going to work this out.
Mo Chroi comes up with a pen, buried in the centre console. “I’m not going to use that pen,” she says with stark finality. “Why not,” I ask. “Don’t you know what pen that is?” “I do know, but she says it for me. “That was the pen from our wedding.” Signs, signs, everywhere signs. “Don’t you ever listen?” she asks. I am silent, for fear of missing the obvious. “I was ready to give up on you,” she told me the other day. “Walk away. No chance of getting back together.” “Okay.” “Then I ran into the girl that did my hair for the wedding.” I nod silently, a pointless but unconscious gesture on a phone conversation. “Don’t you get it? Every time I think I’m done with you, ready to walk away, I see a sign that makes me reconsider. But is it really a sign? Does it mean anything, anything at all?” “Well,” I reply, choosing my words carefully, “I guess if you have faith, faith in your heart, and a true desire to work through this, then yes, it is a sign. Otherwise, it is just coincidence. So which was this? Sign or coincidence, you tell me.” She says she replied, but all I heard was silence. Mo Chroi is the spontaneous one, the whimsical one. I have long seen myself as a creature of routine, of habit. I took an extra break at work today, bored of the tedium and my heart heavy. My breaks with my work mates are typically at 8:30, 11:00, and 1:00, and that contents me. But at noon, I excused myself from my desk, gathered one of the lads, and headed outside to clear my head. The noonday weather siren, a ritual of uncertain routine, wailed in the distance. One of the lads already outside turns to us with a grin. “You ever seen Silent Hill?” I smile in the affirmative, catching the reference, but my mind imagines Mo Chroi, at my brother’s Hallowe’en party, dressed as a Nurse. I lie to myself and say “coincidence” under my breath as I turn to go, but… Sign or coincidence? Mo Chroi looks at the pen in her hand. The Coldplay song that we thought for some time would be our wedding song ends its strains in the background. Sign or coincidence? I am on the freeway, driving to pick up Mo Chroi. She texts me some lyrics from “Love You Till the End.” Taking her Pogues cue, I reply with some from “Tuesday Morning,” which happened to be the next song on the mix CD she was listening to that very moment. Sign or coincidence? Mo Chroi is now at work. I am writing this piece, and fill another page of the notebook I picked from our office. I turn the page to continue… and the next page is filled with schedule notes from our wedding. Sign or coincidence? I am sitting down to type the piece I have written. The CD player in the house has ‘Parachutes’ on full repeat. I fire up MS Word, and “Yellow” begins to play. Sign or coincidence? - You were really great in bed. I’m going to miss that wonderful connection we had.
I am driving on the freeway, to go meet my brother on the near side of town to help him move a desk. A coworker has offered it to him, and he hates to see good wood go to waste. My phone chirps at me, a new text message has arrived. “Sex?” it reads. It is Mo Chroi. Mo Chroi with her gracious and elegant goodbye to me four hours prior. Mo Chroi, whom I’d given up on not three nights ago. Mo Chroi, who’d consumed my thoughts on my stolen noonday break. I am tempted to reply “no,” or, more specifically, “won’t this make it harder for us to finally let go of one another? To grant us the peace we so desperately seek?” I briefly wonder if she’d intended to send it to another but some quirk of error or accident sent it to me insead, before dismissing such a thought as unworthy of Mo Chroi. I make light of it instead. And through it all, the twining strands of surprise and desire. She is Mo Chroi. I may never again get the chance to touch her body, her beautiful carriage. Goodbyes or no goodbyes, I feel it would be the action of a fool to decline her. I smile, and hit ‘Reply’ on my cell phone. - I’m sorry things have to end. Just know that I will always love you, Papa Bear.
“You are obsessed with me,” Mo Chroi declares matter-of-factly. “And I am addicted to you.” Must it end? I wonder to myself. I am at points of varying minds. I am despondent at the thought of the loss of her. A life without Mo Chroi is but the air in an empty vessel. I am confused as to why things must be as they are. We were in this together, would have died a thousand times over to spare one another the merest hint of pain. Is all hope now lost? I am dismissive, layering my heart in rime frost. This is truly for the better, and you must let go. I am hopeful that destiny will prevail over the fickle and shifting mortal minds. Sign or coincidence? What I am not is angry. I tell myself that if Mo Chroi truly ever loved me, she would let me go, with a grim and irrefutable finality. I tell myself that if I ever truly loved Mo Chroi, I would do the same. Then I wonder if it is, perhaps, because we do truly love one another, it is that which renders us powerless to do precisely so. I have felt from the start that the destinies of Mo Chroi and myself were bound up in one another. And that, somehow, we lost sight of this. That we let life get in the way, the ordinary, the humdrum of existence so far beneath us both. I flash back to the closet, Mo Chroi rummaging for her apron minutes after the consummation of our mutual desire. “Drop me off in the back,” she says. The scent of her lingers, on the fingertips and the lips. | 
