April 20th - Rolling Boil

She and I fought for weeks: a real barn burn, so to speak. It boiled in our love like a pot of soup left on the stove for days to cook slow. We would hash it out for a bit, prod slights back and forth, test the seas of our slow burn, but once in a while, we would take a break for a day or two. The storms in our hearts rose like dough, up and out, down the sides of the pan, to the hot-stoked fire, then burst in the heat of our brawl. Like a good book, we set it out back, far from our thoughts, to grow and steep and get some steam on its way to the front, strong and a ripe for war. It built while we let it sit and stew, found brawn in long-lost fights of yore, in things we thought we killed and stuck deep down in the dirt, dead to the world and lost to us, then blew like a fuse on a frost-soaked dawn when the heat, the lights, the fans, the bath, all in the house sucks the juice dry.

The rage burst like a slighted soufflé, a pastry overflowing with magpies, a fragile balloon, sniped from afar by something spoken that refreshed everything previously simmering somewhere subconscious.

Explosions abounded throughout the rupture of renewed discontent, leeching from memories that possessed little to nothing related to anger a fuel that during any other epoch should empty distrust from our over zealous quarrel, but currently nurtured an already-roaring disaster of conflagration. Nothing could stultify our inferno, fueled by enough mistakes and misspeaks that neither involved was capable of dowsing aforementioned, passionate rages.

And then, one grey morn in the days just past May, she set down in front of me a pile of flap jacks and a tall glass of juice, with a mate she had laid out for her. I looked at her eyes and saw no flames there, no fight, no hate, just a deep haze of blue.

We ate in the weak, lambent light of the morning, finished, then spoke:

Thanks for the grub, hon. I am as right as rain, I said.
Thanks for the fight, babe. I am as good as gone, she said.