4:21 p.m. - 2005-06-14
Yet Another Blow Rant
With no time at all to reconcile the reeling searing guilt and longing that accompanied Matthew's sudden disappearance from my everyday life, I had not the emotional space to think about returning to work, to staring into eyes that knew a similar loss. And so I bought time by requesting sick time and vacation time and leave without pay time. Basically, I spent my days sitting on the bed that was really a couch in the bedroom that was really a living room, spraying Evian water on my stunned, beleagured face. Night by tedious night, I would pretend to fall asleep hugging the edge of the mattress exposed by twisted sweaty sheets, as far away from Tom as I could get. He did the same. I stared in the dark until I heard him snore, clutching Bear. Finally, the rhythm of his hoarse breathing lulled me into a kind of suspended animation in which the hazy pain waved to me from some familiar but indistinct shore, visible but gratefully out of the reach of my threadbare senses. I don't remember exactly how long life went on this way. But one day like any other, we stopped at my parents' home on our way back from Andy's Famous Armenian Burgers. We had just seen "St. Elmo's Fire" in an effort to redirect my mind and to give us a two hour reprieve from the emptiness that was us. I remember that the song "Voices Carry" was playing on the car radio. I hummed in my head in spite of myself. Once inside the house, I detected a heaviness in the very air. My parents both looked ashen. They carried some terrible and shameful secret and I wanted only to back out the door and make believe that time would respond in kind. It didn't. My mother sat me down on the blue Early American sofa and told me in a low voice, as though 'it' could hear, that she was diagnosed with colon cancer. My father hovered somewhere above his body, which was positioned motionless as a concrete statue in the Early American rocker, his stone face set against the coming storm. Every atom in the room began to occillate as my mind ached and gasped for relief.
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