Will you love me forever?

Emilia seemed to be effusing that question by doing everything to the contrary. Cosmic glibness on her part. A shrewd move, thought Darwin. Looking back now, he could best remember only the highway, looking out the passenger window a lot, while she drove in her ever-conscientious manner. He would occasionally put his hand on her leg. An idyllic gesture to that of the most secure relationship.

—Look, he finally said, I don’t know about all this reusable rockets to Mars stuff but what they can do with frozen mashed potato these days is mind blowing.

His thinking had always been a little crooked. But something was worrying him a great deal more than the apparently miraculous advancements in frozen mashed potato technology. However, there was no way to comfortably broach the topic. In fact, he thought, in the chapter and verse of human history there has never existed a dignified way to say—I really need to wipe my arse again, right now. Darwin was thinking this as he literally blurted it out. Emilia just groaned.

—A dirty arse, she said. Nothing worse.

—Add a hefty amount of sweat, Darwin said.

—Oh god!

—Keep your eyes on the road!

The future of the conversation looked a lot like the road which stretched out before them: the broken white line down the middle unwinding in a deranged temporal schism in time and space sort of way.

—Stop up here for the booze, Darwin said.  

—I know, I know.

—Ok, just reminding you. Shall we get a pie as well? They have very good pies just across the road.

Silence. Then a tad more silence. And following that a connotation of silence accompanied by some lengthy footnotes of silence. The uncomfortable kind, not the golden kind.

—You know you want one, Em.

—No, no, no!! Don’t. Just don’t!!

Emilia was dieting. Her third day in.

A flash fiction of silence.

—Go on.

—Stop it or I’ll punch you in the cock!

Will you love me forever?     

Thinking back to the beginning, a few hours into this whole thing, this relationship, this romance of his life, this eponymous magnum opus so dubbed by himself, Darwin had proposed marriage to Emilia. It went something like this: He’d just had a very good meal with her and throughout said meal had executed a conversational swagger and exuberance heretofore unmatched in his dating life, in addition he had turned some frightfully ordinary travel tales into wildly delicious anecdotes. From here, he thought, it will all be down hill. So, why not marry the girl right now? At the very least lock her into the idea…

Back in the moment, at the point Emilia mentioned the word “cock” the subject of gender became a correlating climate-zone controlled and communally misunderstood subject to all the passengers of the car. Emilia herself had had a hot flush of anxiety in thinking she often felt she should’ve been born a man. Clyde the dog who was sitting in the back seat licking his balls and blissfully thinking nothing of it had a canine moment of identity clarity, then instantly forgot it. And Darwin, who had turned to check on Clyde, was suddenly defeated by thought that the art of living beautifully was possibly never more perfectly expressed than being able to lick your own genitals in complete obliviousness.

—They have curry pies! Family size. Let’s get a couple of those! Darwin said when turning his attention back to Emilia.

A truncated sentence of silence.

—What about those chunky beef ones with peas? Emilia said with equal parts frustrated relent and gastronomic fervour.

—God, I love you.

Will you love me forever?

Holding hands, walking across the road to the pie shop Emilia was subconsciously anxious yet with an overriding mood of skipping, static-like love for her man, as if a needle bouncing across a dirty favourite record.

—I have this curse of attraction with you. Those pink shorts of yours are not helping, by the way

—A lovely pair of pink shorts should never be underestimated! The qualities of desire are found in its shades of nuance, don’t you know?

—You profound dickhead.

Smiles.

—Why are you making me get this pie, babe? Emilia said.

—I’m not making you…

Incredulous punctuation of silence

—Listen, embrace the fatty goodness of my intentions, right now. I’m trying to get to the bottom of some sort of self-perpetuating mystery. I’m caught in these recurring bombardments of myself. Getting to the black pudding of my soul. I vacillate around healthiness and the whole-hearted abandonment of such. I need to take you with me. You can’t take on a hundred black pudding breakfasts in a row. Especially by yourself. Or maybe it has to be done by yourself. I don't know. In any case, that much salt and congealed blood is too much truth all at once. You can’t do it like that. So I go through bouts of recovery. Fruit and muesli mornings. It’s some sort of masochistic bent. Stretching the torment, the pain of beauty. One understands why Hemingway eventually ordered the shotgun breakfast. At some point, you have to brace for a ballistic vaccine of realism.

Emilia pondered this.

—And the best way to do this is in a terrific pair of pink shorts?

—Yes! And now I really have to go wipe my arse.

— Wonderful.

Will you love me forever?