This is what changes

Isn’t it funny how one thing can have a completely obvious meaning, but if you change where that one thing happens, its meaning completely changes? Like for example, if a little girl is sleeping in bed, that’s kind of cute. But when that bed is in a hospital, it becomes depressing. Or, if an old man is laughing with his old wife in a restaurant, and you watch them from across the room, it makes you feel good about life. Like, you know you’ll be old someday, but maybe you’ll have a friend like that, and it won’t be so bad to be old. But if that same old man is laughing with his old wife in the alley outside a bar, and he’s alone, you try not to look him in the eyes, and you doubletime it past.

Or, just for instance, if your girlfriend is masturbating alone in her room, that’s pretty sexy. But if she’s doing it in her room while another man is sitting there watching her, it makes you so angry and sad that your soul breaks into a hundred thousand shards of glass that stick into the inside of your rib cage. And when your friend tells you that it happened, you want to hit him in the face because you don’t believe him, and you wonder why the fuck he would ever lie about that. But when he insists that it’s true, because he knows it for an absolute fact, and he thinks you should know what kind of girl you’re in love with, you can’t make any kind of expression on your face. You can’t make any expression, not surprise, or hurt, or even a nonchalant laugh, because if you made any expression at all, you would either start sobbing, or you would go into an unstoppable rage. So the only thing you can do is leave, and drive back to your house, and walk inside, and start punching the furniture. Of course, you aren’t punching the coffee table to break it, you’re punching it to break your fist. And just as you’re about to put your hand through the glass, you realize that ripping a foot long gash that runs from the knuckle of your middle finger, to half-way down your forearm is probably going to hurt, but it could never hurt as horribly or in quite the same way as the tiny shards of glass that are working their way through your guts and into your heart.

But sometimes, just because you change where something happens, it could never change what that thing means to you. Because whether the person you love fucks someone else in Boston, or Australia, or in the eighteenth century, or a hundred years from now, you would still be laying on this paper covered mattress of the emergency room, your blood stained clothes in a biohazard bag in the corner, and a heart full of glass, which no number of stitches will ever sew shut.