ONCE UPON Atime, there is nothing but darkness. You stumble around blindly, so close to the edge that you are sure you’ll tumble over it, and if you are going to be honest, you must admit you are so low already you don’t necessarily think that would be a bad thing. Then one day, you meet someone. He finds you kneeling right at the precipice and instead of telling you to get back up, he kneels next to you. He tries to see what you are seeing. He doesn’t ask anything of you, or beg you to snap out of it, or remind you that there are people who need you. He just waits until you turn and squint and think to yourself:Oh, yes, I remember. This iswhatlightlooks like.
You don’t know how it happens, but you become friends. You find yourself looking in the parking lot to see if his car is there. You see something on TV or read it in a book and think,I must remember to tell him. You learn how he takes his coffee and what his favorite color is—not by asking, but by observation. Then you realize that your day speeds up when you see him. The hair stands up on the backs of your forearms when his shoulder bumps yours in the elevator. His presence is so filling, the absence of him aches.
You begin to reconfigure the puzzle of your life to fit him into it. You don’t want to spend time without him, if you can help it. You introduce him to family. You suffer their elbow jabs and their raised eyebrows because later, it gives you two something to laugh about. You wish you could introduce him to the family members that aren’t here anymore. They would have loved him. You see him around children and think,One day.
When he asks you to get married you let out a breath that you never realized you were holding. On your wedding day, your face hurts because you are smiling so hard. Your life isn’t simple, but does that really matter if you have someone like him to help shoulder the burden? Money, jobs, promotions, failures, they are only speed bumps on a track that will go on forever.
You have a child. You do not believe he could love anyone the way he loves you, until you see him with her. She is not just a treasure, meant to be kept safe at all costs. She is the proof that the two of you belong together.
Not that you need proof.
You keep that baby alive like it’s your only job.
One night when she is sick, you are so tired from taking care of her that you go to sleep in the office, on the couch. You think you will never be able to fall asleep without him beside you. You are wrong.
In fact, you sleep pretty well.
It happens again when he gets a cold; when you come home late from work; when you argue. It stops being a guest room and becomes a sanctuary. Your daughter asks if you are going to get divorced.No,you tell her.We love each other.
You move back into the same bed that night. You sayI love you,but it’s no longer like throwing open the windows of your heart. You say it the way you’d sayIt’s TuesdayorI’m a brunette:matter-of-fact, a truth, a statement. Not an exaltation. Not a miracle. You wonder when the core of love changed from passion to compassion.
You never surprise him, anymore, by slipping into the shower when he’s in it. He shuts off the light on his night table while you are still reading in bed, and turns onto his side. You remember how he used to stand with you in crowds, his hand at your waist, protective and possessive. Now he holds your daughter’s hand, rather than yours.
The things that used to endear him to you now drive you crazy. How he clears his throat all the time. How he doesn’t replace the empty roll of toilet paper. How he sings off-key to the radio. But that’s the stupid stuff, you tell yourself. You have real love, not Hollywood love. You have a child. That’s what’s important.
Yet there are days that you fight with him just because it lets you feelsomething.
You begin to wonder if you still love him. You wonder if you ever did. The opposite of love, you think, isn’t hate. It’s complacency.
One day you find yourself in the darkness again, stumbling around, at the edge of a cliff. He’s there, too. But you think maybe he isn’t light, wasneverlight at all. He was just sucking up what was left ofyourlight, to illuminate his own shadows.
You’ve changed. You don’t want to jump into that void. You don’t have to, because the source of your pain is standing right beside you.
When you fall in love, it’s because you find someone who fills all your empty spaces.
When you fall out of love, it’s because you realize that you’re both broken.
—
Why now? Why write, after twenty years? Why turn up like an unquiet ghost, chains in my hands, disturbing whatever peace you have convinced yourself you have?
Because I’m running out of time.
It is the one thing we never had, and I’m sorry to say it’s only gotten worse.
I’m sick, my love. I’m sick, and as my body decays around me, all I have left is my mind. I have had many long hours in this bed to mull over it, and even if we were never meant tostaytogether, we were meant tobetogether. Even if we had to lose each other, we were meant to find each other. I would not have had my marriage or almost sixteen years with my son if not for you. I don’t think it could have gone any other way, and I don’t think itshouldhave gone any other way. You are the catalyst, if not the product of the chemical equation. You belonged with her, and I belonged with him, but for a tiny flicker, we belonged to each other. I just couldn’t leave this world without telling you that you were the one, for me. The one I couldn’t shake and didn’t want to.
By the time you are reading this, I’ll most likely be gone. But because you are reading this, I know that as long as you’re here, so am I.
—
THE SICKER Aperson gets, the more equipment there is. Win’s bedside is cluttered with pill bottles, cups with straws, wipes to soothe her skin when she’s feeling hot. There is a stack of Chux—the absorbent pads we slip under the sheets as incontinence becomes an issue. The cane she used when I met her became a walker, and now a wheelchair. The commode in the bathroom is now a commode beside the bed.
Win has her head turned toward the window. Felix has hung a bird feeder there, and juncos and squirrels and the occasional blue jay twitch nervously on its lip. “Is that a red leaf?” she asks.
I lean closer so that I can look where she is looking. It’s summer, green as far as the eye can see.
“I don’t think so. It’s too early for the leaves to turn.”
