It’s a miracle we ever get out of bed in the morning. I still can’t believe I’m here. 28 years I’ve been trying to wake up from a dream sleep, dawn and open eyes can’t end.
I’ve been waiting a long time for time to kick in. They say it’s supposed to heal better than health insurance. They say it’s the closest thing to the finger of God touching your soul. She died suddenly. There was no time for goodbyes. There was no slow coping or last rites or the comfort of “It’ll be ok. You have my permission to live without me”. She just went. I was asleep, rolling around as I often did. I always worried that I’d disturb her but she never minded. That’s what I loved about her. She never did mind, but she let me worry. She loved my worry. It was a cycle of comfort. It was our way to show that “I love you” meant something practical. Our love was something you could touch with your hands and inhale with the scent of lilies. I still keep them, in the same patch, pristine as they were. The first year they died and I buried them too. It’s something –having two funerals in one year. I cried right there in the garden, like a baby who’s lost its mother. I guess you could say I did it for our daughter, who really had, but couldn’t really cry because she had already forgotten the woman who had fed her for so long. Normally salt is bad for the earth, but there is something in a funeral for flowers. I didn’t even have to water them again. I like to believe that those tears I cried for her were from her. And through me she gave life to those seeds. For 27 years those seeds have produced more seeds and every year there I look at them and remember our love. Something to be touched. Something we could breathe.
I never had a problem with appreciation. She was my everything every single day. I don’t wriggle in bed anymore. There’s nothing to love about rustled sheets on one side of a king-sized bed. My body knows it will not be comforted so it avoids the situation altogether. I don’t understand why but I guess I can appreciate restful sleep. It doesn’t help though. I’m still dreaming. Still waiting to wake up and smell her hair, watch her toes clinch and stretch, her back arching, her skin desperately trying to fuse with mine as she supports my weight with her waist and eyes. I still buy her essentials. I throw away bad food when it expires and give excess shampoo and conditioner to shelters at the end of the month. I like to keep them open in the bathroom and on the sink in the kitchen (a place she hated, but she loved to sneak up behind me while I cooked and rub her smell across the parts of me she loved most –she always stabbed at my heart first).
I opened my eyes to see her still, in a way that at first pleased me and then shook me to my core. Her rich, beautiful skin was an undead shadow of itself. The doctors looked to me for answers as I walked over the threshold of the ER entrance. I looked at them with nothing but questions in my eyes. We were all trying to figure out when she decided it was time to go. I could only think of why hadn’t she prepared me. I couldn’t fathom the idea that she wouldn’t want to say goodbye in the way that we had always planned. An anger I had never felt in her lifetime swelled as I left her in their custody. I already knew the answers I’d get back. I just needed to leave. I needed to find answers to the questions I didn’t have.
Looking at my daughter, I sometimes wonder if she can remember the question marks on my face when I took her from her Grandmother’s arms. I searched her eyes for something that would give me a why, as if the woman who gave us both life had storied them in the opal oasis planted in her pupils. I wonder if she remembers how I got lost there. In a place where I didn’t need answers anymore. A place where I could rest and be away from here. I don’t know when I escaped that place. If I escaped that place. It all still seems like a bad dream.
Now looking into the eyes of my grandson, eyes black as pitch and moist as a wading pool in the rainforest; I wonder if it’ll be over one day. I wonder if I want to wake up from the place he’s brought me. He doesn’t cry when I cry. I like to think it’s because he’s worried about me. He, a bundle of needs, mortgages his time to me and lets me wipe the tears from his cheek sitting relaxed under dry eyes.
It’s a miracle I ever get up in the morning. They are my miracles. They store my extra love so I don’t have to worry about them when I dream.
