More notes on chopping wood.

Today is a few months after the night I found out about what you did with him on the flowered sheets of your bed. I grab a dull ax from the garage, where it was leaning in the corner behind taped-up cardboard boxes filled with old National Geographics and Playboys. There is a large fallen trunk in the pasture and I begin chopping where it forks from a tree so big that together our arms could barely wrap around it.

This was the trunk we had laid next to, that tired afternoon when we breathed in each others’ hair and I pulled down the neck of your dress to feel your breasts. The woodchips on my hand dug into your soft skin and you made the noise you make when cold water hits your back or you see a small bird or animal or inchworm. You held your breath and I pulled the splinters out with my teeth and kissed the small welts. Your skin tasted like onion grass.

This memory is not the reason I am in the pasture. If there was a bigger tree to chop, that is the one I would have started chopping, but this is the biggest one and there’s nothing sentimental left in me so I hit it and hit it again. I don’t save any of the woodchips so that one day I can carve small animals for our big-eyed children.

The trunk takes me longer than I thought it would to chop through it. I chop every afternoon for a week. The ax exposes wood the color of workboots. This color fades within a few days, with the seasoning wood turning a light grey-blue. I mark my progress in falling out of love with you by the thickness of the seasoned band, the lightness of the ax, and the straightness of my back when I go to bed alone.