22. In Safe Hands
There are a million things you are responsible for doing during the day and you do all of them without hesitation, without doubt that you can get them done, without even thinking about it.
And there are so many things that you do during the day that have brought me great joy, pet a cat, hold an ice cream cone carefully, creatively and intricately cut pieces of random colored paper and put them together to sometimes create beautiful things. Hold your son.
But the biggest job you had, and the one that often caused you both happiness, contentment and security and frustration, annoyance and vexation was literally ripped from your grasp, and I can feel your daily ache of not being able to do the one thing you so desperately wish you could do.
Hold his hand again.
I can think back to when you were 16 and just friends and you took that bus ride together from El Con mall to the end of its route and back just to be together, sitting on the bus, each of you just resting so that you barely touched because you weren’t a couple, you were “just friends”, you weren’t together, but you could feel the electricity between the two of you and at 16 is there anything better? One thing led to another and you shared your moments… And as young love goes, it went.
When you found each other again at 45, again, you were just friends. But all of those feelings came back and all those memories flooded in and when you held his hand it just felt like home.
In those early days everywhere you went, you held his hand.
And all the times he came to work with you and did projects together, painting a wall, building a garden, giving out books to children, side-by-side together.
You felt purpose. You were at ease. It was comfortable.
You would reach across the bed at night to feel him there and punch him to stop his snoring.
You would grab for him the item he swore was not in the junk drawer but it was.
You would put his coffee spoon in the dishwasher… every single time.
And in the early days holding his hand was how you let him know you loved him and it was how he knew you loved him. As time went on and your love got comfortable you didn’t feel the need to hold his hand but he always wanted to hold you. Always
and after a while, you were kind of over it. You didn’t need that constant connection in that way. You were annoyed… A 100 ways you proved that you loved him... making dinner, steering the car to his house, folding his laundry, touching his face, not to mention all the tiny little intimate ways that you shared your love with him, just the two of you. And yet his constant grasping for you sometimes drove you crazy. You knew sometimes he used it as ownership out in public as proof to any other man within an in 20 miles circle that you were unavailable, that you were taken, that you were his. You were! But as an independent soul you found that annoying even though he knew you loved him.
And every day now you think back to those last moments that you touched his body.
To drag him off of the couch onto the floor, to push down on his chest to force air back into his lungs, to crack his rib with your efforts to reach him.
To feel his skin to try and feel his heartbeat. To take his necklace that you gave him off his body.
And the very last time you stroked his face as they zipped up the bag and took him away.
You still reach across the bed, not to punch him, but to feel for him. You still twist the necklace around you for some kind of connection. You still write his name as if that will make the last few years disappear. Your emptiness is like a scream that only you can hear.
You still feel to this day that it’s your fault he’s not here. That you didn’t do enough, you didn’t try harder. That you should have been able to pull him back to be with you. That your touch should have made the difference. And you live with the fact that it didn’t.
