Standing in the Doorway

I am seated in a chair, facing toward the sunlight that enters this room through an open door. Outside, I can see tree fern branches lifting and subsiding and the mix of green light growing golden from a lowering sun.

I feel you, though you, in body, are miles away, sedated, supervised, monitored, hanging on. I know that part of you is departing just now.

Moments later, still seated, I can feel that you have slipped inside me, floating messages to me from deep within - that in the doorway, we are holding hands, beholding the sunlight together.

You will step onward and I will remain.

Then I am standing up, forward in time, hearing eulogies and the voices of those who will speak them. Their words do not meet you where you are or recognize you where you once stood. They guess at your substance and rise like the clamor that erupts in a bar after a toast to a long departed loved one.

Strings of myths and stories help the storytellers say to themselves that this is who he was and this is who I am and I exist as he existed. I am real am I not? But you are not and we are not and this waiting underscores all that we cannot name.

We, both of us, were never here but will never leave. How it hurts to have nothing to add but silence.

Awake

Then, we were among the many friends and faces, wet-eyed, laughing and chatting with a see-you-soon ease. By death and slight of hand we became fewer until it was just I and my voices – of no standing and having a calendar only as something to carry in case.

But you came back to me this afternoon as you said you would. I could hear you speaking to me as I walked by the little park a few blocks from where we had lived. You with me and through you my mind opened onto a room where we all were together again, laughing and chomping delicate and exotic morsels, jesting with one another, drinking, forgetting everything we had promised to hold dear, passing through those moments as if we had centuries to spare.

I have no time to spare and I do not want to sleep through sounds like my boots thudding on uneven sidewalk or the sight of a single fall-reddened leaf hanging at the end of its bare branch, or Latin drums drifting from an upstairs window I-know-not-which-one, or a sweet kiss I can taste that helps me remember -

You and I will be together again soon.