Love and Loss: Tales in Human Ink

           An excerpt from my novel, The Seventh Round, to be published soon:

            I don’t sleep well in my bed.  It makes me see things in dreams that I don’t want to see anymore.

            I took the bed from my house when I got divorced.  My wife and I slept in it in the last few years of our marriage.  I took it to my first bachelor apartment, and I had no problem sleeping on it.  No sorrows, no sentiments, no associations.  I took a few other women to bed in it.  Pull back the sheet and you can read in the brown and oval stains the story of the denouement of my marriage and the sex and brief infatuations that followed.
            The bed was fine for a few years like this.
            Then I met Johanna and fell in love again.  We wrote a new story in the bed to overlay the old, in human ink and in whispers: “I never loved anyone as much as you.”   We took the bed as ours when we shared a home, along with her two kids and mine.  But it fell apart before it even started.  We were great lovers, but we could not live together.  We could find joy only in the bed, and out of it, not much more than sorrow.  She didn’t want me there, and soon, I didn’t want to be there.  In the midst of this, I lost my job.  Money soon became a problem.  I went bankrupt.  Break up, reconciliation, infidelity and reconciliation again; finally, she told me to go.  That was a year ago.  I came here and brought the bed with me.  I was glad to go and it was fine for a while.  A brief vignette with another woman, done before the ink dried, was written not long after.  And then I settled into the bed, alone. 
            And then the dreams began.  Johanna came to me.
            I thought I hated her.  And I suppose I do.  But I can’t stop loving her, either.  She comes to me, or I bring her, and does it matter?  She is here, and I make love to her in my dreams.  But there is no joy in it.  There is me, and Johanna, and an awful space between.
            I can’t sleep well anymore unless I’m dead drunk.  And tonight I am not.  I’m awake in the frozen dark, panting and sweating from an unbearable flush of heat.  I toss the quilt aside for relief.
            Later, when I calm down, I know that I have to get her back.  And if I can’t, I have to settle this once and for all.