“Married, Filing Separately” by Claire McQuerry

was always our tax status. There’s no love
in money. Sometimes there’s no love in love.
Sometimes love is a fish-gill
slit in your heart through which you learn
to breathe. That’s how it was.
When I found the long silver hooks
of another woman’s earrings
in his bathroom drawer, I raised
an eyebrow. I said, “Oh.” Sometimes
a waterspout rises from the lake or twists
from the sky to its surface, and after
this column reaches land with its silvery skin,
the trees it’s touched look like they’ve been
through a blender. That’s how it was.
Day after day, I learned to empty myself
into the basins of another’s need. At night,
driving through the Poconos, you might see
no more road beyond the bend you’re rounding.
At night, at home, you might hear the steady
drip of resentment’s leaky taps. I drove
two thousand miles each month to my job
because of love. Sometimes marriage
is like that. Sometimes it’s the sugar substitute
he spilled daily on the kitchen counter, its little
packets crusted to a ring of cream. Sometimes
marriage is the hallucination of a dead baby seal
on the side of the highway. “And how would
a seal wind up in the mountains,” he said.
“How indeed,” I said, willing by then to believe
or disbelieve anything. The accountant seemed
confused the first time we said we wanted
to file taxes that way. It’s the loans, we
explained. Blah blah blah. Still, the separateness
felt symbolic. The student loans were his,
were bottomless. I threw my money into them too
and thought this was love. Amelia’s earrings
had silver leaves and teardrops
of cubic zirconia. I knew her name
because of Facebook. “I was lonely
when you were away,” he said. “She only came over
to show me some yoga and smoke some pot.”
I looked at the wall above his head
and said, “Oh,” and what I meant was
dead baby seal, ribboned trees. What I meant
was the till is empty—
I have no more dollars left to give.