Please, remember me
happily
by the rosebush laughing...
I dreamt of you last night, for the first time in a while.
I dreamt of a kiss, I dreamt of a kiss with my eyes closed, laughing, and then I slowly opened my eyes, and inches away I could see those eyes, those eyes, those cornflower blue eyes. I pulled away, and saw a face that looked familiar, and I pulled further away, and I saw those eyes, I saw a smile, and for the first time in forever, I saw you, come from wherever you may be, to say hello, and, as much as I wanted more, to say nothing else.
Please, remember me
fondly…
I wanted to ask what you were doing here, I wanted to ask you how you were, but you closed your eyes and kissed me again, and when I pulled away, your eyes were closed, and you smiled, almost laughing.
I heard from someone you’re still pretty
and then
they went on to say
that the pearly gates
had such eloquent graffiti
like we’ll
meet again
Chaos swirled around us. Sirens and flames and children singing and playing and laughing. I pulled away and still you smiled, with those gorgeous eyes closed, and I reached across whatever lies between us to kiss you again, and I strained against some sort of deadline imposed by something I didn’t understand to tell you about all you have missed, about how our children have grown since that October morning you kissed them goodbye for the last time.
You’d know what to do. You always did.
You’d know whether we should leave for your homeland, and you’d know how to make that happen. You’d know whether I needed talking down off the ledge, or if we needed to be booking one way flights to your motherland.
You always knew what to do; the way every decision you made seemed to work out strikes me as uncanny even now, nearly eleven years since you left us for good.
who the hell can see forever
But then, that last decision you made, to not go to New York or Boston for the surgery; the one wrong turn you took. You always smiled, like the smile in the dream-kisses you sent me last night, when my fears reared their ugly heads.
What if these locals don’t know what they are doing, I asked, pleaded, even. There’s no rush, I said; they told you have a year, maybe even two, before you have to make a move.
It’ll be fine, you said.
I just want to get this over with, you said. I’ll be OK by the New Year, and then we’ll buy our next house and we’ll move in.
She’d never steered me wrong. Not once.
Every time we came to a fork in the road, fear would strike me into indecision, and she’d shake me out of it. She’d say, go this way. Follow me. And I always did. And it always worked out.
Until it didn’t.
&&&
I woke slowly. I didn’t want the dream-kiss to end and I stubbornly laid beneath the sheets and closed my eyes tightly, trying to will myself back to sleep, back to those eyes, those lips.
But there is only so much the will can do.
Reality calls for its pound of flesh, for answers to questions.
Her eldest child slept somewhere else last night; the youngest child, not hers, but the fruit of the second great love of my life, slept a couple of hundred miles away, with her mother and her mother’s desperately ill mother.
The last time I talked to her, my mother-in-law, she said to me, as if praying, I am afraid, tell me I am not going to die while this monster is still president, and I told her, you’ll make it, but who knows, I don’t know if she will, I don’t know if any of us will.
&&&
And Lauren’s two youngest, one just fifteen months old and the other just nine days short of her third birthday when her mother passed on, slept mightily. We’d been invited to a party on a lake the day prior. Like their mother, they loved the water to the point of obsession. I swam with them on and off for hours. Other children at the party went in and out of the water, but Evie and Riley stayed in, relentlessly, the way their mother used to as a child, hour after hour.
The morning inched close to its end. I looked in on them, and, at nearly half past eleven, saw their eyes still closed tightly, and my heart broke for the millionth time since she died as I wished that she had just thirty seconds to stand next to me here and now, thirty seconds to watch their little chests rising and falling, slowly up, slowly down.
&&&
She’d know what do, I think.
I lay back down, feeling defeated as I realize I have run out of coffee.
Might as well sleep a bit more, and try to bring that kiss, those eyes, back for a few seconds. But I can’t.
I think of all the hopes and prayers lofted at her as she laid low in that hospital bed. I think of how I’ve been hoping and praying, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that we will dig ourselves out of this abyss. I want to believe, and surely there is still reason to hope.
I think of her, on that last night; I think of all those hopes, all those prayers, falling once and for all short of their mark, unanswered. I think of her, not knowing if she knew her life had come down to its final moments.
Sometimes the arc bends the right way, towards justice, or a happy ending, and sometimes it doesn’t. We kneel and plead but we can’t know whether prayers will be answered.
But I do know this: she’d be mighty angry with me if I threw in the towel now.
I’m not here for these children, she’d say.
But you are. And you better fight for them.