After fourteen years, he lost his love for me while studying rat testicles for the Army. He twisted a sinewy arm, moving it like a pinned specimen and said, “I just don’t want to be married anymore.”  The toxicologist he loved, instead? She waited, toxically, in the wings.

Once, he took me on vacation, neglecting to tell me we were scouting his next prey: deer, maybe elk. No sushi or pho, he fed me pop tarts, Granny Smith apples, and kipper snacks on a rainy mountainside in Colorado. And, yes, I do admit, I loved it.

Not many months later, the undersea lines between Afghanistan and Maryland crackled like the tension between us, ready to break our marriage up before he had the chance. I imagined the miles of transatlantic cables, arrested beneath the ocean, their noble purpose serving his deceit. Not too far away, but far away enough, an improvised explosion shook my hooch-home walls like a galloping horse.

Never will I forget our moonlit nights by the Mediterranean so many years before. We lovers bellowed like Brachiosauruses, the two of us drunk on rakı and our future forever. What I always will remember is how our love is no different than those dinosaurs-turned-fossils who migrated under the very same moon.