Hate is not the opposite of love. Cherish is learning this now, sleeping, it's coming to her in her subconscious. The revelation. The understanding that hate and love are just different contraceptives for passion. It's playing out for her in real time, the rapid, sudden climax to the film you were about to turn off, her life quickly approaching the credits as her chest swells and sinks beneath the heavy comforter, the highlights in her brownie brown hair spidering out over the pillow, reaching towards the nightstand that keeps the alarm clock and lamp, a glass of finished orange juice, and an empty bottle of prescription pills.

A strip club is where you'll find honest people. That's not to say the activities conducted here can't be misleading, covert, veiled. Gentlemen's club is a bit of a misnomer, and a substantial percentage of the employees are not, um, authentic, but all the people here, you know their purpose. Nowhere else is the employee-customer relationship so defined, so apparent, and nowhere else do their respective agendas go unspoken and without question. The dancers are here to see money. The customers are here to see dancers. This inherent understanding reduces the establishment to a very primitive level. The more fundamental a business, the less potential for confusion. This is why people don't accidentally stumble into strip clubs, mistaking them for a dry cleaners or a Bob Evans.

At least, this has been my experience.

How I'm different from most guys is that I do not particularly care for strip clubs. I dig women, sure, but the strip club environment doesn't get me hyped like it does other dudes. I have the same problem with films. The actresses, I can never get into them because even though they are real people, they are not real to me. Tangibility is a very important quality in a woman. I cannot fall in love with someone I know in only two dimensions.

The women on stage are real in the sense that they are present, and on some level may even be accessible, but the things they do on stage, their dancing, it doesn't do anything for me. None of it is natural, erotic. It's sort of like those cheerleaders during college basketball games who jump and kick and pyramid and somehow these things are supposed to make you more excited about basketball. Respect the talent and skill these people have, sure, but I'm not getting all hot and bothered about it.

The girl-on-girl shit doesn't work for me either. But my buddies here at the table, these guys I burn Friday nights with, they are rabid fucking dogs chained to chairs, barking saliva at the meat marching by in stilettos. Chasing the tails they will never catch, these guys occupy themselves with things they'll never have. The seventy-inch flatscreen. The loaded Benz. The waterfront beach house. The custom-made suits. The nineteen year-olds making out feet above them, struggling to keep balance in five-inch platforms.

These guys want. I don't chide them for this, don't put myself away from them for it. I am just as guilty, just as infected. It's just I succumb to a different strain of want. My want comes in flashes and is so comprehensive and consuming that it's probably better I don't get off on every speck of flesh that comes traipsing across the stage, screen, sidewalk, lest I end up with a state-issued time-out for three to five.

It's nearly a debilitating condition, this want that plagues me, but we all live with our own conditions. It's more about the coping mechanisms we employ to balance the disparity, so in the end I can't knock the dancers for being here, can't knock my buddies for growling at them, can't knock the bouncers for letting Cherish through the door.

Like I said, a strip club is where you'll find honest people. When a woman comes in by herself and is not here to pick up her asshole husband, when this type of woman comes in and sits down and you're not the first person to go ask her how she's doing, well you can go ahead and consider yourself a fatal procrastinator.

It wasn't like I was looking for a coping mechanism for my infected life of want. More than anything I needed to know why she came in here, this conspicuously normal woman all by herself, stepping into this palace of honest desire. I wanted to know why, and wanting to know why gave me reason, distraction. It gave me something, a puzzle, and because she was both the question and the answer, I fell in love with her. I relapsed back into my want and before I even got to her table and sat down and shook her long slender fingers for the first time, I sought her, craved her for being something I didn't understand.

Cherish smiled at me, knew I was coming. She wore the look of control you wear after making someone climax. She beamed while she watched the dancers, watched not out of lust but admiration, me knowing this only because she told me, me knowing what I know about her only because of what I chose to hear. Cherish sat with legs crossed, arms folded, content, and yet I urged to be with her. To be part of her.

The word committed, it has multiple meanings for a reason.

See, even when you're content something is missing. The ritual is gone. It's why people eat when they're full, cheat when they're married, drink when they're drunk. Maybe this is something, maybe it's not, but when I asked her, over the redundant thumping of the frantic house music, if our little scenario here was a beginning or an end, she gripped my hand, telling me one thing, then whispered to me another.

"No promises," was what she said.

Routines are a good way to forget who you are. Build yourself a habit or addiction of some sort and you needn't worry about your ambition anymore. The constant anchor of a deadweight routine will help stabilize the volatility of your individual progression. Apparently this is an important achievement, writing off the quest for your dreams so that you can focus on the facsimiles of your everyday life.

Never thought it would get to a routine with Cherish, so it didn't. Yes we did the dinner thing, the movie thing, the camping trip thing, the gambling jaunt thing, the wedding guests thing, the party hosts thing, the vacation thing, the Christmas party thing, the birthday things, the fight thing, the doubt thing, the break thing, the reconciliation thing. We subscribed to the normal life and it was delivered daily to the apartment we shared, me and her and Cole.

Cole is my dog. Cherish would say he's our dog, but she's wrong. I don't own Cole, see, I own in him the same way people own land. A piece of paper tells them so and they believe it. But really we all know nobody owns any part of nature. Which is why I always thought it was silly, people getting married, signing themselves over to the possession of another. Why I like Cole is because he has not known remorse. Everything he has ever done, all of it was accomplished without any residual baggage. He has an unyielding trust in his instincts. There is nothing fake about his bark, his bite, nothing artificial, nothing about his agenda that's concealed. I could very easily see Cole fitting in at a strip club.

Despite his wild, reckless, sometimes selfish agenda, Cole does know certain limits. Like when he gets into the trash to chew wet paper towels, I appreciate how he cowers purposely out of respect for me when I catch him. I used to yell at him for it, smack him to teach him it's bad, don't get in the trash. But one time he showed me his teeth, that gravel churning gargle of danger in his throat, and for the instant I understood that all along he knew it was wrong. It was just sometimes he didn't give a fuck. He did what instinct dictated. And if someone challenged him, even me, he addressed them as such.

A threat.

So it was important that Cole dug Cherish.

Cole never mauled Cherish, so I guess that was a good sign. I didn't know for sure until the one July 4^th party we had at the river. That muggy summer night had Cole panting under a picnic table in the scattered snippets of shade while a couple dozen people milled around looking for someone else to talk to, the crimson sun bleeding out in the background.

The whole event was like a reverse-Independence Day for me.

Marcus was a friend; knew him from work, did happy hours together, lifted with him. Prototypical strip club bloodhound. Decent guy, had no problem being a dick to people, irritable, had about as many dimensions as a piece of tape, but an okay guy. He came to the party for Michelle, but when Michelle showed up with Lawrence Marcus sat down by the cooler and fueled his cynicism with alcohol.

A medium-body merlot-cab blend, dry with a herbaceous nose, this is cocaine to a dog. Cole's palate knew lamb-flavored large breed chunks, various chicken and steak treats, rawhides, paper towels. He did not know 1982 Mondavi. So when Marcus found entertainment rationing wine to his water bowl, Cole let his instinct lead him astray.

And instinct can be fatal.

The charcoal grill had me sweating when my friend Lori came over. I was prepping the marinade when she said it.

"It's Cole," her words an armada of doubt assaulting my rationalizations. "Now."

Lori's sun-touched face went pale, went empty, retreating to the huddle of people at the shore, pulling me with her.

Cole was on his side, shivering, the barrel of his belly convulsing as he vomited again and again, yakking in that wretched stretch you pull when your body purges. His stomach pumped a thick red out onto the matted wet sand, a red I incorrectly hoped was wine. Cole's lava oozed heavy down the flat sand, pulled thin by the weak tide as it diluted the fractured opaqueness of the calm river water.

Keys, car, vet, recovery. These thoughts were my essence until Cherish streaked by, her tail of brownie brown hair trailing her as she pounded down the bank to Marcus, who sat reclined in a beach chair, smoking. Cherish pulled a tiki torch from the ground in her joust and Marcus was oblivious when she dove at him, pulling him from his chair to plant his face in sand.

Not sure how you're supposed to respond to a woman blindsiding you, Marcus struggled for control of her wrists, but Cherish already had his shoulders pinned beneath her knees. The flaming torch twitching in the wind above her head, Cherish sent the burning tip into the base of Marcus' skull. The sand absorbed most of his scream, but by the time we got her off him his hair was already its own flame.

Marcus didn't press charges. He was left with a spotty haircut and quarter-size scar in the back of his head. We don't do happy hours together anymore.

Cole finished up with an ulcer and a scare, a week in the animal hospital, and a lesson he may or may not have already known. He still chews wet paper towels.

When I pulled Cherish off Marcus, she let me. She knew what she was doing was wrong, but rage is just one of those infections that has to run its course. I held her and she shook, her eyes harbored on Marcus until I turned her around, her tear-streaked face proving her to me.

With it Cherish clinched me. Trace back through the defining moments, the mile markers of your life and she is right there on the state line. The hallowed grounds of your own life morphing undetected into her jurisdiction, the Estate of Us, you understand how far you've come. How a change in location initiates a change in yourself. How where you've been does not suggest where you're going. How even landmarks are subjective.

The word committed, it has multiple meanings for a reason.

That first night at the animal hospital, Cole under, his eyes tight, tubes thrust down into his stomach, Cherish gripped my hand like she did in the strip club, when we met. That squeeze that let me know she was there, part of me, me part of her. How we were journeying through the Metropolis of Us now, bounded, and it could've been the emotion of the day, but I told her I couldn't let her go.

"No promises," was what she said.

I never asked Cherish to marry me. Never did the kneeling thing, the formal, arbitrary exchange of sentiment and unoriginality and precious gemstones. I did surprise her with a trip to Fiji while we sat out on the grass down by the lake, the doom of autumn's chilly bite setting in on the horizon. Cherish's face flashed with orange while she pulled on the blunt, her cheeks indented while her lungs worked the weed. Her eyes closed, her chest still, her life suspended, dead for a second, I ached at this. I pulled my own sample from the blunt, kept it inside, let it grip me, and Cherish watched. I pulled her to me and she came, our mouths greeting, and I breathed into her all that was within me. She swallowed, her eyes closing, her chest still, dead, and I asked her to come with me to Fiji.

And just for the record, Cherish nodded and exhaled, but she never said yes.

The church official was half my height and twice my age, his eyes creased sharp in the corners, perpetually wincing. We didn't know what church he was from, what his designation was supposed to be, but ceremony is ceremony so Cherish and I did the ritual on the sand while the South Pacific tide lapped around our ankles. Some book sat closed in his brown blocks of hands, his cave of teeth glinting out his smiling lips as he recited the words that bounded so many other people before us. Twice he stumbled, the rising tide swallowing his calves and balance, pushing further up onto us as we continued.

When he stopped talking I kissed Cherish and she kissed me, like a thousand times before, and it was done. Some hocus pocus incantation, a consummating embrace, and then the world was different. The church official looked at me. Cherish looked at me. They were smiling. I was not. This was to be the threshold to everything most people seek to obtain, but what I was thinking was how much of a waste I was, quitting my own life.

The word committed, it has multiple meanings for a reason.

"You okay?" Cherish asked, squeezed my hand.

I had taken her to the opposite side of the planet for a makeshift wedding, away from the tradition and friends and family that she would've preferred, I pulled her out to the edge of the island to the cusp of the sea, I brought her closer to me than any other creature has ever gotten, and as soon as it was done I began to push her away. Her squeezing my hand now was less a reassurance than it was a reminder, a grip. Seizure, repossession, auction. I fake-smiled for the first time, thus initiating the atrophy of my sincerity, and as I beheld her on her most beautiful of beautiful days, I saw that what makes you beautiful makes you vulnerable indeed.

Cherish sent her arms around me, clinging, her smell getting into me. The scent that used to charge me was now the stink of poison. The shampoo that meant Cherish was just so nauseating. Her pure face was pretty the way a mangled dead bird is. Her tranquil whispers deafened me, a viral infection in my eardrums. She kissed my cheek and it burned, me wishing to carve the tainted skin off my face with a jagged sea shell. I pulled and kicked my feet free of their nest in the sand, the tide washing them clean, and Cherish's pretty little eyes showed worry, concern, alarm and all I saw was my enemy.

"Baby," she leached herself to me again, wily. "We gonna be alright?"

The cool liquid of the South Pacific splashed up on us, rooting us further into the sand.

"No promises," was what I said.

It was a Tuesday when Cole ran away. He was gone every day after that. I spent exactly three hours and forty-seven minutes looking for him before I flashbacked to his gnarling teeth, his gargled growl, and how it didn't matter what I did, Cole would chew paper towels anyway.

If I had to guess why he left it would be because he couldn't stand me anymore, couldn't deal with my dependency. I could've picked up blow, booze, gambling, cigarettes, a thousand vices to wed myself to and I chose a woman. Like your suffering family member who begs for euthanasia, sometimes the tough love is best, turning your back, just outright saying no.

Quitter.

The thing with dreams is, most people don't know what they want. So when the dream is actualized, they wonder where the magic is. Why the suffering doesn't stop. Why the void is wider, deeper. Why the achievement of a goal does nothing but add to the lack. Cherish talked about our goals, a gelled mesh of things she wanted that I'd tolerate, talked about adding on to the house, talked about offspring, talked about family, togetherness, crib, future. I loved her the way people love God, just in case, and did my nod-and-smile routine of displaced emotion until it was too much.

I told her, maybe I don't want kids.

And then I had power. Crushing her, defeating her, winning, I had individuality again. I was the independent Satellite of Me and not just a hemisphere of Planet Us. Yes, there was the subsequent unhappiness on her part, the triple beam balance of our emotional unity elevating in my favor while sinking her into despair. Then something flickered inside me that made me think of Cole.

"But honey, why…"

She asked questions to which there are no answers, only reasons. Reasons I could devote my life to explaining and she'd still not get them. She is a good woman, good in the sense that she loves and nurtures and is genuinely kind. Good in the sense that she doesn't murder people. Good in the sense that she wants attainable things.

You could call her naïve for devoting herself to me, this emotional hermit of a man, but it only added to her allure. The truth is, for all things magnificent about her, she is the obstruction, the deterrent, what has kept me from me. The survival instinct kicked in and it's only me now, only me chasing myself, pursuing my want.

I smiled at her.

Cherish was strong the way an adversary should be, a worthy sparring partner. She protested my children rebuttal, that fight surfacing in her again, her instinct committing her to object, to challenge, and I revisited my admiration for her. She stood on the bed, towering at a height that would have let her ram her toes into my throat, but instead her eyebrows descended and she needed to know why, why why why why why, needed the understanding, the schematics, the blueprint, the history leading up to this irrational declaration, the service report detailing why we were broken.

Smiling, hands cupped around her ankles, her scowl still screaming at me, I pulled her legs out from underneath and she bounced twice on the bed. I pounced, the need driving me, and succumbed to the version of passion men are supposed to exhibit with their wives. For thirty-eight minutes we're Mr. and Mrs. Us again. We were back in the strip club, honest, two people seeking receptacles for their passion.

But desire is a chocolate devil's food cake with a heroin base, opium icing, and acid-laced candles. It ravages you while it can and when it's done there is a crater that leaves you hating what you sought, leaves you changing the temperature of your passion, leaves you seeing your closest confidant as your most despised adversary, and it strikes you that love and hate are just two corners on the same side of the white padded room of your soul.

The word committed, it has multiple meanings for a reason.

"Baby, can you get my pills…"

Cherish always gets headaches after our husband-and-wife activities are fruitful to her, so I got up to get her pills. Out in the living room there was a man looking at me through the sliding glass door. He was my reflection, how I'm presented to the world, but he wasn't me. He wasn't who I am, what I'm about. He was a muddled, watered-down mosaic of my half of Us, imprisoned.

I turned away and filled a pint glass with orange juice. I took it to the hallway bathroom to get her pills and all I could think of was Cole. Cole roaming the streets, prowling, slumming, constantly defending, the world against him, the world so cold to a stray dog guilty of nothing but being alive. He'd been gone for months and by now had starved to death or was put down by animal control. It seems death is to some an acceptable consequence of pursuing your own life. But like I said, instinct can be suicide.

And I guess it can be homicide, too.

I took the orange juice and bottle of empty pills back to Cherish in the bedroom and she had her eyes closed. My weight on the bed opened them and she smiled, my glorious, grinning villain. My powdery fingers handed her the glass of juice and I offered her two pills in my palm. Cherish took them, swallowed them, drank the glass dry. She dabbed her lips together, her eyes stretching back after she gulped the cocktail down.

"Bitter," was what she said.

You define yourself with your enemies, so I'm lying next to mine. This is as harmonious as it gets. Cherish drifting off not to return and me lying in bed next to her, my arms snaked over top her, wishing her off. She was a threat who became my rival, my conflict. My contempt for her swelled only as far as the capacity for which I loved her.

Because hate is not the opposite of love.

I rest myself on her cheek to say goodbye. Her breathing lingers for minutes, the occasional rise and fall of the comforter over her failing body, the highlights in her brownie brown hair spidering up to the nightstand with the alarm clock and lamp, finished orange juice glass, and empty bottle of prescription meds that were three-quarters full this morning.

Then Cherish isn't part of the Us Tandem anymore. She isn't anymore. At all. She's off to see Cole in his other place, the place where instinct eventually takes you, and I sit on the bed with myself, thinking that maybe this is what I wanted, to be me, myself, without constraint.

Out in the living room I see myself again, this other man looking back at me in the reflection of the sliding glass door. I wonder who he is. I wonder if he's the good guy or the bad guy, how you tell the difference. We need conflict, and mine was starting to decompose in the bedroom, so I smile at the guy, nod, ask him if he wants to come inside and be my villain. He doesn't answer me, so I step closer, the guy in the reflection matching my gait. I push my face right up next to his.

"No promises," is what he says.