Earth to Boyfriend
by Gemma Mindell
The cafe table sat between them,
A wooden barrier in a sea of latte foam.
She leaned forward, eyes narrowing,
Adjusting her glasses like a scientist
Preparing to dissect a very small frog.
“I have standards now,” she said,
Her voice a low, steady hum of intent.
“I am done with the dreamers and the drifters,
The men whose thoughts are helium balloons
Escaping into the upper atmosphere.
If you want to walk this path with me,
You must, above all else, be grounded.”
He nodded, a slow, tentative movement,
While inside his mind, the gears began to grind.
Grounded. A simple word, he thought,
But then the filing cabinets of his brain
Threw open their drawers and scattered papers.
He looked at her earnest, seeking face
And wondered exactly what kind of trouble
She expected him to be in.
He knew he wasn’t a criminal,
But perhaps he was a circuit or a boat.
His first thought drifted toward the copper,
Thinking of the high-stakes world of Electrical Engineering.
He imagined himself with a green-clad wire
Soldered firmly to his left big toe,
Trailing behind him across the linoleum
To find a rod driven deep into the soil.
Is this what she wants? he wondered.
A man who offers no resistance to the surge,
A human lightning rod for her static shocks?
He saw himself checking his own insulation,
Ensuring he wouldn’t blow a fuse
If they happened to touch near a kitchen sink.
“I’m very safe,” he thought about saying,
“I have a three-prong plug and a surge protector,”
But he sensed that was not the vibe.
Then his mind took flight, or rather, didn’t,
As he considered the rigid laws of Aviation.
He saw an orange tag dangling from his ear,
A “Remove Before Flight” ribbon fluttering.
Had she checked his maintenance logs?
Did she know about the cracked windshield
Or the slight shudder in his landing gear?
He pictured himself stuck on a tarmac,
Engines idling, fuel burning away to nothing,
While the tower denied him clearance to move.
“I’m currently under investigation,”
The imagined version of himself explained,
“The FAA says I can’t leave the house
Until I fix the hydraulic leak in my heart.”
He worried she might be the inspector,
Clipboard in hand, ready to revoke his license
If he dared to dream of a weekend in the sky.
The silence stretched, and she sipped her tea,
Waiting for a sign of his stability.
He shifted in his seat, feeling heavy,
Pondering the terminology of the Maritime industry.
He felt the sudden, jarring crunch of wood on sand,
The sickening tilt of a hull meeting a reef.
He saw himself as a shipwrecked captain,
Marooned on a sandbar at low tide,
Waiting for a moon that might never come
To lift him off the rocks of his own making.
To be grounded is to be stuck, he realized,
To be a landmark for seagulls and barnacles
Rather than a vessel of discovery.
“I have a very shallow draft,” he rehearsed,
“And I am currently wedged in the silt.”
No, that sounded like a cry for a tugboat,
Not a prerequisite for a second date.
He looked at her shoes and thought of his mother,
Falling back on the classic rules of Parenting.
Perhaps she wanted a man who had been bad?
A man who had stayed out past his curfew,
Who had dented the fender of the family sedan
And was now confined to his bedroom
Without the use of his gaming console or phone.
He imagined telling her, “I can’t go to the movies,
I’m grounded until the end of the month
Because I didn’t finish my chores.”
Would that show her he had discipline?
That he was a man who understood consequences,
Even if those consequences involved
Losing his car keys for a fortnight?
He felt a sudden urge to ask permission
To stay out past nine o’clock,
Just in case she was checking his privileges.
Finally, his mind settled on the aesthetic,
The visual principles used in Art and Design.
He looked at the way he sat in the chair,
Wondering if he looked like a floating balloon.
Was his visual weight insufficient?
Did he need to wear heavier boots,
Or perhaps carry a small sack of lead shot
To ensure he didn’t drift off the canvas?
He imagined himself as a figure in a painting,
Lacking a shadow, lacking a baseline,
Just a hovering ghost of a boyfriend
Ruining the balance of her living room.
“I provide a strong structural base,”
He wanted to tell her with total confidence,
“I am the bottom third of your composition.”
The table felt colder as he cycled through meanings.
Maybe she meant he was buried in the dirt?
Like a potato or a forgotten time capsule?
He wondered if he should start acting more soil-like,
Stationary, damp, and full of minerals.
He contemplated the way worms might move
If he were truly, authentically grounded.
He looked at his latte and saw a whirlpool,
A liquid disaster he was too stuck to escape.
He felt like a bridge with no road,
A foundation with no house on top,
A literal piece of the planet’s crust
Trying to hold a conversation over tea.
She reached across and touched his hand,
Mistaking his panicked confusion
For the deep, quiet stillness of a soul
That was truly and deeply… whatever she meant.
“You see it, don’t you?” she whispered.
He didn’t see anything but a dark seabed,
A broken circuit, and a very angry mother
Waiting for him to come home and do the dishes.
He swallowed hard, the copper wire in his mind
Twisting around the shipwreck on the sandbar
Near the airplane that wasn’t allowed to fly.
“Yes,” he said, his voice a bit strained,
“I am very grounded. I’m practically buried.
I have no intention of flying or floating,
And my electrical resistance is quite low.”
She smiled, satisfied with her choice,
While he wondered if he should buy a multimeter
Or just hand over his phone and go to his room.
He decided to stay quiet and not move,
Lest he accidentally reveal his lack of weight
And drift upward toward the ceiling fan,
A victim of a vocabulary he no longer owned.
The coffee was cold, the air was still,
And they sat together in the heavy silence
Of two people using the exact same word
To describe two completely different worlds.
He felt the weight of the seabed in his shoes,
The pull of the earth on his copper toes,
And the looming threat of a month-long curfew.
It was, he decided, a very good start.