why are you making so much noise?

she came down into the kitchen
once.
eight o'clock on a sunday morning
and screamed,

what are you doing?
I can't sleep because you're making
so much noise.

I was buttering toast.
making a cup of coffee.

her eyes were bugging out of her head.
she'd be angry for the next
week.
with no words said.

I was dead to her after that awful
incident.

then there was the time
there was a thin coat of ice on
the cars.
which melted as the sun rose,
or was quickly wiped away
with the brush of a hand.

and she screamed and said, my
married boyfriend would have warmed
up my car
and cleaned my windshield for
me. maybe I should go back to him.

maybe you should, I told her, which
sent her off into a rage.
a bomb about to explode.

one snowy afternoon
she saw me looking at her book,
the modern version of the joy of
sex which made
her start crying.
why are you looking at such things,
she said. and I replied.
ummm, it was on the table, and
it's your book, you bought it
and brought it into my house.
just getting some ideas.

she ran upstairs and curled into
a ball on the floor,
in a darkened room
and rocked back and forth for hours
on end, pulling at her hair. moaning.

another time,

I asked her why she kept a photo
of her married boyfriend
in her worn copy of
the bridges of Madison county,
in the nightstand next
to our bed,
a book she had underlined over
and over again, believing her
affair was just like how it was
in the stupid maudlin book.

he's my best friend, she said.

I tore the photo up, which she
quickly replaced with another.
their photos of one another were like
rain drops, endless.

and so it went. you can't argue
or reason with crazy. you want
them to be normal and see how nutty
they are, but they'll never see
the light.

there is no light inside their
dark souls. thank god I escaped.