“I can see your mind processing,” she said. “I can tell you’re not entirely here.”
It was true, indeed, that I had a song playing in one corner of my mind, a to-do list forming in another, a scan of the room happening in a third, and in the fourth, an escape plan developing.
“Perhaps you need to learn to be here, now,” she said. “Perhaps you need an Om moment before we begin.”
After they took the baby away, she began knitting. The needles transformed yarn to sweaters, blankets, socks, scarves until her hands and eyes ached. But when she stopped, loss shook her like an earthquake, the core of her faulting and slipping, her stomach knotted from the upheaval.
Piece by piece, she layered herself with acrylic and wool, trying to warm herself from the outside in, trying to weigh herself down so much she could not help but still.
Sadness, which once pooled like mercury around my feet and poisoned me slowly, rolls back when starved for attention. Watching the thermometer only slows its progress toward normal. One year, then two, then three, and I burn cooler by degrees with each turn of a calendar page. Eventually, it will be as if fever never overtook me, as if delusion twins dream, twins memory.
Her thoughts slipped from her head, then darted about in the air like gnats, just missing each other as they slipped from side to side. She hadn’t asked for this kind of morning; it just came upon her suddenly, as if she’d walked right into it around a sharp turn of a path. She knew exactly what she wanted, but it was not until hours later that she quieted her mind enough to remind herself.
Fair warning, she said. I combust on impact.
He kissed her anyway—a little fire seemed such small risk.
I know how to bank coals, he said as he wrapped his arm around the small of her back. In case of emergency, I know where to find water.
The words ease me into that time again as if it were murky water, the seaweed-slimy memories grabbing my ankles and tangling me there. I try not to panic, but it’s hard to breathe in liquid, and I struggle to keep above it all. Others would dry off and retreat, but I must go in to go forward, even if I can’t see the bottom, even if the shore retreats faster and faster the longer I’m submerged.
He disappeared sometime in the night, and she woke alone, hands reaching from her curled-up self in a sleep-blind effort to find him in the dark. He returned then, taking one of her hands in his, whispering because voices are too much for that hour. He told her he’d just gotten too hot, he hadn’t wanted to wake her, he was back for the duration, everything was OK. He wrapped himself around her, and it was all she could do to stay awake long enough to let the gratitude settle.
100 Proof 