The weighing of our hearts on 87th street

You are handsome in a way that women like me like. You have a nose that might be better suited on a larger face, and long, delicate hands that speak to a life of academia. Your mouth is wide and inviting. I know the shape of the back of your teeth by now, those sparks of memory send electricity through me intermittently as the day progresses.

You’re Italian, or Sephardic, or something that gives you angular features and dark eyes, undulating curls that are kept and unkempt in a way that makes me want to run my fingers through them. You don’t have great taste in fashion, leaning more towards bland than any other signifier, though you find it to be a point of pride that you care-dont-care about your appearance and still have women like me staring up at you starry-eyed.

And I am. Besotted, that is. There isn’t another word for the gut-punch terrible feeling at the pit of my stomach that makes me want to turn and vomit every fifteen minutes. It’s not my first time in love and it is an unwelcome friend. Get ready, It says. I clench my fist against the nausea.

You know a lot about geological features. I have a taste for men with a touch of the absurd so I’ve chosen you- you who can recite the Geologic Time Scale like numbers on the clock. ‘One before two and Carboniferous before Devonian, you know.’ I nod. I’ll remember this information years later to pull out at a trivia night that you are not involved in. I can’t help but absorb these pieces into my personality like some sort of cloning device.

You are really getting going as you point to the Book of the Dead at the Met. I suggested it because I enjoy looking at the history of ourselves, and have stupidly hoped you would want to hear what I have to say. The scrolls span across the room like broken wings. I wander closer wishing that we hadn’t given up logographs all those centuries ago in exchange for letters. ‘Imhotep was much more than a priest…’ you’re saying and I nod along, making the appropriate oohs and ahs. I sew my mouth shut, you don’t want to hear that I know this already. That I spent a year of my adolescence pouring over Egyptian history after I learned about Hatshepsut and that women were pharaohs and still hated too.

I’ve done this before — I try to be you and you get bored and I just get tired.

So I nod. I’m hopelessly in love with you and you love the way I treasure your knowledge. I’ve spent years in relationships like these before and I worry that I am going to find myself circling the same drain for the rest of my life. You look like every man I’ve ever loved before, give or take a few inches.

I’m not a manic pixie but I am interesting. And I’m smart. And being an interesting smart woman feels lonely in an eternal sort of way. The more educated a woman is the less likely they are to get married. I can see it- it’s not want for trying on my part. I just feel so damn lonely with each sentence I utter to you. You with your degree that somehow weighs more than mine like we’re weighing our characters on Osiris’s balance. I don’t think I’d win. Every woman pharaoh had been colored by appearance or wiped from existence in a way that tells me they hated us too, in every era.

I’m tempted to ask you which geologic time period women would be accepted as equals but then you might refer to us as ‘females’ and I’d have to reckon with myself about loving you in tandem with knowing that word sits in your vocabulary.

It’s not that I’m against loving you. It’s just that I feel so separate from your love — like I’m a cheerleader to your intelligence. I have to treat every interaction with you as if you were on a pulpit and I was a fanatic and it makes me fucking empty inside.

Your nails are neat as you point out The Weighing on papyrus. I like your fingers. They reach good spots inside me and sometimes that feels like loving me too. All these excuses I use to make up for the fact that you only love your voice and the way I understand the nuances of your dissertation.

Here you think, here is someone who gets me. I keep wishing you would get me too.

I’m watching you on the other side of the balance. Your collar is stuck up in a funny way and I want to fix it for you and I also want to disappear. Actually, I want to tell you about the Egyptian creation story where the god of the universe ejaculated on a rock and made the world because I think it’s funny and interesting and that is what I am too. I know you don’t want to hear things like that because I’ve said them before and it made you think of something else you knew and could tell me.

I wonder what it would be like to be there, in the underworld with Osiris. I wonder if the scales are obsidian. If it would be hot like I imagine hell would be. I would see you on the scale far far below me. You weigh so much. I look down, I’m on the other side with the feather. It’s obvious. To you, I’m barely even there.