But that’s the past, right? And the past is called that for a reason. Because it is behind us, which is good enough for me. No, I try to live in the present. Live in it, work in it, be in it. I-am-present. And presently, what’s bothering me is this. It’s, well, how can I put this? Delicately, I suppose. That’s the only way to do it, I will put it delicately. It’s that thing, that skin thing on my wife’s body, that is what’s bothering me. Haunting me, really. That growth. Now, it’s a fine time to bring this up, some physical complaint about my partner, I know that, but I swear I never saw it when we first met, back when we were going out. I’m sure that I didn’t. I had no idea that it even existed then, back in our courting days. Not that I didn’t see the woman naked; of course I did, on many occasions. But it was often dark, at night, in the heat of passionate embrace. Plus, I wasn’t giving the woman an examination, for God’s sake—the once-over, as my parents’ generation might affectionately call it—so I don’t feel that I can be held responsible for missing it in the beginning. Hell, it may not have even been there, now that I think about it. It might’ve sprouted recently like some new-forming island, erupting from the deep to settle and flourish on her shoulder there. Well, not technically her shoulder, but that fleshy stretch that runs from said shoulder to the side of her neck. Right there. I mean, come to think of it, the number of times I saw her in sleeveless shirts and swimsuits, her wedding dress even, it seems unfathomable that I could’ve missed this outcropping, this mound of darkened cells that brings me such distress.

Pitiful, you say? Insipid and facile, not to mention shallow? I agree. I completely agree with you that it isn’t rational or loving or even very grown-up, but that doesn’t alter the fact that it bugs the shit out of me. Almost pathologically so. That wart cluster on my wife’s flesh is slowly, methodically killing me. It really is.

I first noticed it last summer, right around the Fourth, I guess, as we were getting ready for a little holiday blowout that my company throws every year up at the lake. You know, that lake just outside the city limits that still has a few trees surrounding it. Not really the country, but as close as we come to it around here. Anyway, we were getting ourselves together for that and I was coming out of my closet—I remember this quite distinctly—and I spotted the offending flap from across the room. I mean, spotted it like a drifting sailor notices land appearing on the vast horizon.

“Hey, what’s that?”