Is it Sunday or Monday? he said this morning when he woke up. And I know how he feels. After fifty, the days start to blur. Yesterday -- was it just yesterday? -- in the naked afternoon, he wrapped his arms around me, and Id asked him, Do you ever think about not being here? He doesnt think that way, he came back from the dead, he said. But here I am talking about death, and the thing I want to tell you is how I didnt know that his calm would heal me. It doesnt scare him that I have an identity so tentatively carved to my shape that Im waking up not remembering if there is anything at all to do, and craving nursery food. I pad downstairs and make cinnamon toast, and slice nectarines, and run my fingers across their spiny centers where the pit comes out. I think of lines from Margaret Atwood poems that I love: Inside the peach there is a stone, and its necessary to reserve a secret vice. I will be old with random lines of poetry spoken over soft food. I pad upstairs and hand him the sugarbread. Fabulous! he says. He started to talk like this after the brain injury, so many exclamation marks in one day. It used to piss me off, all that genuine delight. And now, now that I have breathed through years of his, and my own, forgetting, his joy in living gives me space to empty out. To become nothing special. To slide away, and see what the random day makes of me.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 14:30:08 +0000
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