Saturday, Feb. 20

I cried five times today. I cried with the car radio, twice. I cried while I was running, the tears streaming down my face. I cried very hard in the parking lot outside Starbucks. And I cried while I stood before the reeds on the side of the lake, between the running path and the pink setting sun. We had walked there before, in brighter light, and we’d seen the swans. Two trumpeter swans, lazy in the reeds, and they turned and watched us with small inscrutable eyes. You stood with me, watching them, holding my hand the way you did the last years, just a little too tensely for the moment. The swans were only swans. They weren’t momentous, or frightening, or even very beautiful. They were a little dirty, in fact, but something to watch, for they were unusual in the reeds of our lake. My neighbors were all twittering about them. But it might have been just that about them, their surprise, their unusual quality, that gave your grip that edge. You were struggling, trying to hold on, and perhaps the new in any shape had become painful. Or perhaps that made them even better to you.

I thought about you all day. At times I would forget, very few times, but then I would remember and my mind would scramble to have any idea what to do. I could feel the panic in my head, hovering up somewhere above my eyes, as the truth came back to change everything. At the end of the day when it flooded in harder, and I was afraid of being alone in bed with it, I told myself I could lie back to it. I made up a story, several stories, enough until I felt better, about what I would do to keep you coming back. What I would say if we were five weeks back, and the phone rang, and you told me all that was wrong. Or if I asked. How I would tell you to get all your things together, a change of clothes, your medications, and drive on up to me. How I would put you to bed in clean sheets and lay all your pills out in order. I would have you take them all. And the careful combination, all the chemicals given in just the right way, would work the change and keep you here. And I would hold your face, and just once again I would see in your eyes that you heard me, heard me, the person I am, when I asked you to stay. Here. In life. Till the end of days.

And thinking this story let me sleep.