I have taken the steps of a church only a few times and two, the only two I can really recall were departures. In both instances I was trying, in the stall of a lime-lighted ladies’ room, to pull myself together, to tug out the tears that tore at my insides; both times I was facing death and somehow, both were my firsts, such blood on my dress.
When I see Bob, I climb the stairs again, an unlikely third. I am barely there. I am still wavering in the first minutes when my sister called me home. I am still staring, slightly awry, outside of my portrait pane…and still, still I am calling his name. When I see Bob, for the very first time, I am not yet in mourning but the morning has broken; I have made the phone calls, and my anxiety has broken my rituals, my rest, my raw need for relief. I am hoping he will pull me back. Not together, as all of my insides have been ruptured and rearranged, as my heart is half, as I am hardly able to breathe in my own heat, let alone float in this faraway place I chose (I chose this, I must remind myself) over the Atlantic, with so few tears in my eyes. My mind is somewhere else and it is not mourning. Nor is it shock anymore; but rather the red-pebbled markings around my eyes are entertaining, are explicating, that I too am somewhat gone. That my stork, whether wiry or old, shot dead by his own insides, leaves me wailing, homeless and thoughtlessly un-whole. I am small, I tell Bob, upon us meeting. I am too young.
I think all children, whether definitionally so, feel this way. What I realize, what I am told, is this. And yet my own stands out so strong, before the fuzz has drawn its way around his eyes, before his beard is marked only by gray writings and wings, before I am attempting to draw—and now to write—him out, in fear of forgetting and fretfully forging the wrong man. My youth suddenly pounds upon my chest and my rush, to retire, to conclude my studies, to reproduce is slowed to a Midwest paste, African or Latin American time, the ticking clock crushed beneath my flushed, flowered, bitten fingertips.
I am nowhere near ready to lose this person that I love so vividly, to be frightfully fatherless in a world, a way already misleading. I am nowhere ready to say goodbye. And so, my first frantic embrace today is that of our words, our conversations, the broken lines where he brought me, always, home: today it is this, in his e-mails, on the cold, white page through which we once spoke. Me: ‘Are you sure I did the right thing?’ Him: ‘100%...but to what are you referring?’ Just the sounds, the soft of the semantics speak worlds to me, unravel me into the piles of kisses, warm embraces, quintessential (and essential) quilts of love, I still—when smiling, when centered on the teetering tip-toes of my mind—can find, can feel, can smell across oceans and much larger, deeper voids.
