"All this talk of love..." and she lapsed into reminiscences

or
"Another Story"

I thought it was over. Our last conversation on the phone had ended badly. Apparently, I wasn’t ready for a “serious relationship”. I scoffed at first "I am about as serious as they come” but the end kept coming. No matter what I thought or felt, I saw the end of the tunnel coming closer and closer and there was no light. It was a dead end.
I held the dead end on the phone. The long cord twisting through the kitchen down the stairs past the back door and down to the basement steps into the private dark. The dark dead end began to announce it too had given up. I followed the cord back to end the disconnection and the receiver’s preconization of the situation.
I was cold. It was late and turning fall. I looked out the dark kitchen window. The solitary light about 20 yards from the house glowed down and shifted the shadows as the tree moved around it seemingly seeking out the light in all the dark. There was a halo and haze around the light but only for a moment as I took a deep breath and shook my head: resisting, defiant, and shaking the moisture from the edges of my eyes.
I was losing grip, but I would do it quietly. I would slip under the darkness. Back to where I had been before. Before I had known there was light, before I knew worth, before I knew love. Knew love? I sneered at my self as I threw the mason jar at the porcelain sink. I didn’t know shit. I wasn’t ready to take the relationship to “the next level”. Would love share the same marks of completion as a video game or pretentious business proposal? Was it nothing without the “Golden Ring”, the “signed contract”, and the final act of consummation? Fine, I’m too immature. But how was I immature if I knew I was too immature to make that kind of commitment? Why was it this knowledge that was the end, and none of the other things I knew? Was I crazy? Knowing my mind was fighting against me. My heart demanding things my head was not about to deliver. Knowledge isn’t power; knowledge is the means to every end. I was full of knowledge. Thoughts drowned in my head mixing with my hard pulse and I wanted to cause damage. I wanted to inflict harm. The beat within yelling for release demanded response. I knew the target would end up being me.
The cuts were wide from the thick glass. It was not sharp enough for no pain, or was it that it was too deep. My hand was throbbing. The slices on the Moon in my hand seemed to eclipse the other planetary mounds and make the Ley lines of my life more obvious.
I dab at the cut nearest my bloody love line. It was made deliberately, slow and hard. There are no hesitation marks feathering the line. This line will not change the head or heart lines on my palm. It would not be mistaken for a preexisting line. The mound of the Moon (the pad on the heel of the hand) is the area of receptivity, either positive or negative (stagnation). I had cut through the fat to the meaning: intuition, moods, sensitivity, illusion, lunacy, escapism, addiction, psychic vision, the subconscious and spirituality. I remember all this, as the blood tried to fill the gap, from the Hindu who had tried to teach me palmistry.
I already knew this would not be my last love before the cut was made.
I needed it to feel.
I had released the anger and felt the trapped pain beneath cold calculating reason.
I was reassured I was alive, but now I wanted it to stop.
Maybe some aspirin, ibuprofen, or something would help. Slowly my brain took the reigns again, a soft thought wrapped my bloodied hand nothing is over till I know it is