How easily things are broken

 

I am alone on an island.  I don't dare open my eyes.  This is the afternoon where I gave up.

This is soft red upholstery and the reclining position.

I woke up with a pain in my foot.  I wake up with pains, sometimes, like I traveled a great distance while I slept.  This morning, I came back from summer camp as a teenager.  A creaky cabin that appeared to be a single room, except that in the dark, the nothing went on forever.  My hands held in front of my face, groping in shadows.  I laughed, too, because you were with me, though you weren't.

I have dreams where I'm young and lost, but I know something, too.  I know that someday, I'll lie next to you.  We will be married, I'll wear a borrowed dress and there will be a baby at my feet and another in my belly.  In my nightmares, I don't have anything to be afraid of.

My nightmares are all about being young, and I've outgrown that, now.

So, I woke up and hobbled down the stairs.  My red haired baby, so tall she could touch the sun.  She sat on the floor surrounded by three stuffed dragons, talking to them in her dragon language.  Sometimes I say to her, "Use your big girl voice, please," and she gets tears in her eyes and says, "This is my dragon voice.  I am a dragon."

I told her, mommy hurt her foot.

She said, "Oh no!  But who will cook our food?  I see you can walk a little bit, right?  Let's see if you can make it to the kitchen," and started dragging a chair from the living room to the stove.

This is a wonderful, beautiful thing, to live like I do.  This is a blessed thing full of luck.

Sometimes I think you might not be real, the you in my memory.  The you who showed up at my house on Friday evenings, you who I showered for and shaved.  You, who I paced the floor for, positioned myself carefully on my beaten up sofa.  Lit candles for, hustled together drugs for.  Saved things for.  Shared things.  You.  I remember sitting naked in your lap as the sun came up.  You had to be at work, and your alarm was sounding from the bedroom.  We heard your neighbors in the hallway, waking up and shuffling out the door.  We didn't sleep.  I remember staining you, writing you lurid letters that sent you running through the parking lot on lunch break.  Waiting with my ear to the door.  You'd be here soon.

Now, we're like stars, with all the space between us.  We share the sky and it's ours.  Our children have big brown eyes that make me worry, how beautiful they are and how easily things are broken.  I can't always reach you with my fingers.

Today is another day where I am old, where I stand at the sink and give up on the laundry.  I give up on the sweeping and the toys.  Today is a day where I left the windows down in the car during a storm, where the wind blew the covering off of the pool.  It is another day where sunlight is only sunlight, and not evidence of the time that is passing too slowly until I can see you again.


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I linked up with Heather of the Extraordinary Ordinary's Just Write, today.  Do you have a moment to free write about your day?  Click here to link up, and find some beautiful writers.



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