Every Little Thing

She’s having a week. She’s had a misleading period of not crying for several days in a row and then she gets the Mexico email that reminds her she’s been rejected. They couldn’t make it happen to go on a vacation for fifteen years but in just over six months apart her husband has booked a vacation for himself with someone else. Rejection is an aspect of this whole shitty deal that she doesn’t like to spend a lot of time on because she can go from I am an amazing and talented writer and sometimes even semi-decent human to Obviously, I am not worthy of romantic love. Her fifteen-year marriage is the longest relationship of her life by fifteen years, unless you count one relationship that lasted a year and a half with four breakups. She has an old story going in her head about how she broke the first two hearts that ever came her way, two dear, lovely boys sent to her by god in high school and then college, and that having rejected god’s gift of these dear, lovely boys, she would now endure a loveless lifetime of heartache and rejection. Subsequent to this, over the next twenty years of dating, she is broken up with countless times, she breaks up with only two more men, one of whom seems truly heartbroken but ends the breakup lunch consoling her. So much easier not to be the one who causes pain. Which leads her to wonder, yet again, what her husband tells himself about causing her this kind of pain, because he often says he’s not causing it at all. He usually says he’s sorry she’s in pain. Her friends, across the board, blame him. She believes they believe this. She knows the marriage ended because he wanted it to end. She has many, many versions of what his deal is that exist in her head; some of them exonerate her from the blame. She has tried to be a good partner. But sometimes after all these years she still thinks some larger force doesn’t want her to have this kind of love. It is a bubble bath, get under the covers early and watch TV in the dark kind of night.

Her bud and the kid and her boyfriend and the rapper bound through the door making noise. We’re home! Where are you? What are you doing in there? It’s only ten o’clock! Everyone, into the bed! Everyone piles into the bed. Three teenagers and her old bud. What are you doing in here in the dark?

I’m just in a mood.

Don’t worry . . . one of them sings.

About a thing, everyone joins in. ’Cause every little thing, is gonna be alright.

This is totally ruining her blue-mood plans, this party in her bed. It’s more than ruining them. Every little thing is alright, right now.

The kids are going to a young people’s sober convention this weekend. The rapper drops his rap for the sober rap battle. (Ya sponsor just called me, told me he got ninety days, asked me how to hide his relapse, I told him ninety ways.) Everyone cheers. The party breaks up and the kids go into the bathroom to do who knows what, they’re being sort of quietly giggly, the kid emerges laughing with her hair done like Trump at one point, goes back in, they softly sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” in harmony.