Pig, Text, Love

You say you love me. But only when I ask. To the moon and the stars and back again, you say and your press-button, ticker-tape words come easy to you. You laugh—at least I imagine you laughing—and blow kisses to me from far away. And I don’t really know if to the moon and the stars and back again is really what I was hoping for. Do you know it took only fifty-nine hours and forty-nine minutes for Apollo 11 to get to the moon? To reach the stars it’d take a little longer perhaps—but short of forever, I think.

‘Jeez!’ you say.

Then silence and I don’t now how to respond to that ‘Jeez!’ so I wait.

Counting the seconds and then the minutes—holding my breath.

Then when I have given up and am not expecting it, my phone pings and on the screen I read, ‘Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, forty-three years or so later it still has stars to reach. That’s about as near as forever as we can get.’

Did you google that?

Maybe you’re right, I say, but I knew a man who once loved a great muscled sow. Loved her more than he did his till-death-do-us-part wife. He took to sleeping in the pigshed of a night, fondling her sweating pink dugs in the straw-and-shit dark and whispering the sow’s name over and over till it was like music or prayer. But when the sow was old, blind in one eye and limping, all her piglet days behind her, he cut a hazel switch and drove her lumbering to the butcher’s in town, had her made into bacon and chops and sausages. He said he loved those sweetheart sausages cooked in pig fat with a little apple sauce on the edge of the plate – loved them to the moon and the stars and back again, he said.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ you say.

Pig, Text, Love

I send you a heart emoji—not sure if that has any meaning after what I have just said. When you don’t reply I send a fried strip of bacon emoji and a sausage emoji and stars.

Nothing for almost an hour—and it’s funny how an hour can feel like such a long time when you’re waiting – to the moon and the stars and back again it seems and even a little like forever.

Then a heart emoji sent back to me.