This afternoon at the breakfast table in
our sunlit, white cabinet, beige floor, red accented kitchen, Rachel suggested
that I begin writing a blog just as casually as she verbally reminded herself
that she should shave her legs at some point in the day. The everydayness of the corresponding statements
struck a chord of possibility within me even when I realized that just as
shaving her legs is quite a production for Rachel, staying motivated and
interesting enough to keep up on a blog is more of an intention of mine than likelihood. Besides, I wondered as she began underlining in
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The
Birth of the Prison, the light reading she used as a break from the open
and waiting GRE study guidebooks on the small table I insisted she share with
me, what could I possibly have to write about?
In a hushed conversation at The Gaming
Grounds in Kent yesterday afternoon, my best friend Nick said that I would just
have to make the smallest things seem interesting, and proud of himself for passing
on that tidbit of divine knowledge he had grinned the smile of a trickster god.
But,
I had wanted to tell him, the
smallest things are already interesting.
From the way she folds a pencil in a
book and it still closes obediently for her, to the furrow of her brow when she
puts book aside and opens a laptop across from me, it’s the tiny details that
enthrall me so. Somehow, the kitchen
grows darker even though the sun still shines in through the window, and the
white cabinets are all shades of gray. She
doesn’t think I watch her, anymore, which is probably for the best since it
unnerved her so much in the beginning, when a year ago, we moved into this
yellow house on Maple Street. When she
begins to cry, I’m reminded of all the reasons why I want to dedicate myself to
writing daily. The very first on that
list is that I lost my ability to comfort her.
When she cries, I feel it in my veins and taste it in the mucus that collects
in the base of my throat. I feel it in
the pressure that settles on my chest and pushes as it simultaneously tugs. I hear it in the voice screaming inside me to
reach her when all my eyes can do is watch.
What good is my comfort anymore? I’d want to add here that I used to be
considered a comforting creature, much like a loyal dog or a cool breeze, but
as she closes all of her books and stacks them as she stands from the glass
breakfast table, I realize I can no longer remember ever being any sort of
comfort.
Rachel departs from the kitchen with
stiff shoulders and her laptop in one hand, arm extended away from her both for
balance as well as distaste for technology as she hugs her books close to her
body; Books that mean she’s preparing for a world she doesn’t think she has a
place in. How many graduate school programs
has she looked at, this morning alone, and read the details aloud with disgust
in aftertaste? If she could change, she
told me before she left, she would. But,
I don’t know why or what it is, exactly, she thinks I want her to change. It is me, though, of that I’m certain, when
she has two Freudian slips of “you” in sentences that were meant to say
something like: “I’m sorry that I-“ but instead come out, “I’m sorry that you-“. I know it’s me, I’m fueling the grief within
her with my lack of comforting remark or touch, but I’ve lost any words that
could be sculpted by my tongue into any sort of apology, and in a moment of her
shown emotion, all but my eyes and hands are paralyzed.
Rachel returns to the kitchen with an
apology for letting out emotion, her face cleansed of truth and instead falsely
reassuring that all is better. She
shouldn’t stress so much, it’ll all work out, she says, and while I’m tempted
to give a sound of agreement, I refrain out of fear it will shatter the words
she doesn’t believe.
It’s lunch time in the gray kitchen, and
though my stomach rolls at the thought and smell of the black bean soup I made
a few days ago reheated in the microwave, I’m thankful for her presence once
more. Something about the sound of her
teeth against the spoon tells me she hates me, but I ignore it in favor of the
breeze outside, wishing I could look up and watch a coffee curl played with by
that cool breeze that I am not, but I’m unwilling, just now, to make the
afternoon any more difficult for her.
The fact that I should probably shave my
legs as well could be the casual excuse I remove myself from the kitchen with,
but instead I’ll probably rise and pour myself another cup from our co-bought percolator
and hope that I’ll see her smile before she runs away again. It feels like a very bad Sunday. I poured too much cream in my cup, she won’t
look at I or I at her, and we’re supposed to visit her mother today. The kind of closeness needed for a trip to
Dover is considered miniscule in comparison to other excursions, but there’s
something terrifying to me about a forty-five minute car ride only to see the
woman who so wrongly entrusted her daughter to me.
“Have you told Nick yet that you’re
moving?” Rachel asks me at last, the
only words she’ll speak to me.
“Yeah,” I tell her, softly, feeling
without looking, though I do look, that she’s crying again. “I told him yesterday,” I tell her, and
resist the urge to tell her I did so
while crying. Right now, I can’t summon
the energy to grieve the loss of the friends I’ll be leaving behind, something
Nick understood even as he reassured me he and Rick would have to take a
roadtrip to see me. It’s her I’m
mourning. But, I’ve already lost her.
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| A photo sent from my Mom in South Carolina. Nine puppies born May 14th. |
