She was hurt and dejected: “Oh, now you want to pay attention to me.” She continued putting things away—in the pantry, in the cupboards. Even things that didn’t belong there. Even things of no value. She was getting her affairs in order. Or making her life seem less unseemly.
“You haven’t learned anything,” she said, placing a half eaten lemon into a teacup, placing the teacup next to a crystal bowl of sugar. “And now you come to me as if you care.” She stopped and laughed derisively at herself. “Perhaps I can teach you now what you’ve always refused to see.”
In that instant, I saw myself no longer as a young man, but perhaps an old fool who had missed his adulthood and gone straight to the clearing at the end of his path. I saw myself in a tarnished silver teapot. I didn’t like what I saw, nor did I recognize the face. But I knew it was me.
She reached under the sink and came up with a plastic bucket. It was full of the babies we never kept, broken promises and half-finished ideas. She ran the faucet and filled the sink with saltwater tears and regret—to make it go down easier—she said. She worked from skin of a person who had been dead for a few days but not quite a week, her eyes looking for something in the middle distance, as if staring from a coffin. Her heart had been embalmed long ago.
When the mixture finished bubbling and draining she asked me if was happy. I said I wasn’t. She put her eyes on me for the first time today and it felt as if she was looking at me for the first time ever—as if she had never seen a creature so sad and so strange. She leaned into my face, ran her fingers over my nose my eyes my past. Then she kissed me…
…I woke up with her laying by my side. I was neither young man nor old fool. The weight of my mistakes were in my jaw and pulling inside my chest. She smelled of life and hope and wonder and all of the things love is made of. She rustled from her sleep and asked me if I was dreaming. “No,” I say. “I wasn’t.”
Tags: bird in the hand, bookends, chameleon
