Its like I dreamed it all up, him talking to me again. Like I am the crazy one for thinking he actually went anywhere. He’s just here, I can hear him in the bathroom, humming while he pees, like he does every morning. The sliver of light from the bathroom door falls across the carpet to the bed where I lay, red clock digits read 6:06 reminding me that the worm is his and I let him have it.
I always go through 3 alarms before I can even open my eyes. He is up by some internal alarm that his body has heard since he was 16. I have spent many a Sunday trying to keep him between the sheets. No matter the begging, cunning and pure seduction I impose on him, he is up and down the hall like a bullet, I spent so much of my adolescents dreaming of the romantic man who would lay in bed just to watch me sleep, I laugh now at the cruel irony, that it is I who watch the man who never sleeps.
We both like orange juice. If we forget every reason we are together now, Orange juice will save us.Orange juice will be the one thing we agree on until our deaths. We like the carton kind with the little blue lid and the oranges on the container, looking so moist and fresh, as if taunting you to just nibble at the carboard, because it really is fruit. Everyone wants to try that, don’t pretend like you haven’t wished that. Anyways. Juice, with lots of pulp, he likes a drink you can chew.
Breakfast is something we mutually understand, it is Switzerland. It is the time of day where we seamlessly work. He has eaten before I even get up but still he sits at the table, sometimes he reads, other times he just sits and thinks. He doesn’t sit for just say 5 minutes and then heads for work, he sits for 1 sometimes 2 hours. I have no idea what he ponders in those moments, they are his and I don’t ask. I eat cereal. That’s all I can handle at 8 in the morning.
“I’ll never understand how you eat that snap crackle crap,” he says
“I don’t get why you stole Paris Hilton’s pansy dog.” At this his jaw clenches, eventually relaxes and he says, “You want more juice?” filling my cup without waiting to hear my answer, stopping just as the juice hits the rim of the glass.
I make fun of his dog, he over-fills my orange juice and smiles snidely as I gingerly sip it down to a manageable amount. So I lied about Switzerland. Truth be told, we have never been to Switzerland and I don’t think we ever will.
He gets self-conscious about his work sometimes. He tells people that he is en route to becoming a professor, a life seeker of knowledge. He and I are the same in this respect, he describes teacher using 17 adjectives, I say I am a weaver of words, a Watson for the human language, when really, I’m just a writer. I think his work is noble but he had some crazy ex-girl friend who dumped him because he made some middle-class sum. She turned out to be a lesbian so I’m not entirely too sad at her selfish departure.
Before now, you could ask me a million things about love, life, the future and I could tell you down to the second what my plans were and how I was going to get there. Somewhere between Phoenix and Dallas, plans changed and I am here yelling at a dog that looks like a football sized cotton ball, sucking up scrabble pieces with the vacuum yet again, and wishing things would never change.
Even when he’d leave for work I’d feel this sudden urgency, like a premonition of something terrible, but nothing ever happened. He always came back, kissed my cheek and it was fine. I was fine. I couldn’t imagine being one of those military wives who had no idea where on God’s great earth there husband was at any given moment. If he was dead, or alive, how long it had been since he ate or brushed his teeth.
2 nights later I found myself sitting on the toilet in our bathroom all of my clothes still on, pants up, sitting on the toilet, humming. I hummed, the melody, so familiar, so simple. It was a song his mother used to sing to him to help him sleep. I hummed louder, rocking my body back and forth to the rhythm. I hoped that it would help me sleep. I could hear the dog’s claws scraping at the closed door. I closed my eyes and sobbed.
I think I knew it was too good to be true before I even saw the end. I read him this quote once about the person you will marry. The quote melted on my tongue like butter, he was silent well after I had stopped reading. “I know what they mean.” I knew too. The quote says you marry who you do because they see past all your crap, you can no longer get away with anything, and for some reason you aren’t mad, in fact, you’re impressed. You think, well done, ladies and gentlemen we have a winner. And you stop looking.
I made that all up now Im thinking. The clock still reads red 6:07 am. I listen for him humming at the toilet. It is silent. I reach across the bed and caress where his body lay so many nights, familiar and warm, the mattress worn to fit his body and his alone. I remember the first few nights after I tried sleeping in his spot. I layed so still my breathing startled me in the silence. I tried to take smaller breaths as if that would make the suffocating silence decrease. The dogs jumped up beside me and I didn’t push them away. Their dissapointment at finding me and not their papa lying there was as poignant as a pained child. “Im sorry,” I whispered to them. Finn curled up agaist my rib cage, he usually ran from me, but he understood that now, more than ever that I needed him, that some how he could fix this, even just a little. We laid, breathed and tried to fill the void.
The next day I went to the shop where we bought his watch. He demanded that he pick his own watch, I obliged, after all he had to wear it. It had always been heavy but today I was certain it was made of solid gold, heavy, priceless.
“can I help you maam?
“I want this sized.” I said laying the watch on the glass
“For?’
“Me”.
“This is a man’s watch, perhaps I can interest you in one of our female styles?’
“This watch is fine.”
“And what about the owner, doesn’t he want this watch?” He said this to me like a child who has just been scolded for a mundane thing.
“The owner” I gasp, “ gave it to me.”
I watched the man behind the counter take out link after link
Sometime later I left the shop, his gold watch, the familiar tick, cool gold, loose enough to slide off without touching the clasp, good thing too, I could never figure it out.
