PDF versionHer head fell down upon his down-pillow shoulder. Roused, his drowsy mind fell upon a confusion of fingers: his-and-her tips and pads, a too-close tangle that his free hand reached for but could not free, pulled at but could not feel or be felt as his own.
That part’s already dead, he thought without saying, knew without thinking, was without being…
A brilliant bank of white-light windows drowned the fluorescents and washed out the television’s muted face. Rachel stepped shyly into the common room but her mother, Miriam, already knew where the two were sitting. Miriam had been here before. She had seen her husband and that woman together in that same, comfortable way during a visit months before; at that time she had left for home almost immediately and found her husband once again in the closets and corners and empty places of her house.
On days her husband was home, Miriam never went to bed before midnight. Her head fell on her pillow; her body grew heavy and slowly sank into her mattress. Where her body led, her mind followed. She slipped toward sleep but her husband’s snoring tugged at her, keeping her restless until the alarm buzzed and her night was over. Miriam lay exhausted through the squeak of the handle and the sizzle of his shower. She almost found some rest but his fumbling through closets and dresser drawers drove it away. He kissed her lying cheek; she was only feigning sleep. The sun had come up and was poking through the blinds. The car started up in the garage. The garage door opened… and shut. Miriam was up.
Throughout the day, weariness sat undissolved in her chest, lay like a haze over her brain. It clouded her thoughts and slowed her movements. She found herself in the bathroom but had forgotten her purpose. In the broom closet she realized that she was in the wrong place to look for milk.
Though on days her husband was away—on sales calls or at con¬ferences—Miriam went to bed only slightly earlier and she was up at about the same time. But her sleep was deep and nourishing.
When her daughter was young, Miriam busied herself with getting Rachel to the bus stop on time and with picking her up from the same corner in the afternoon. Miriam made after-school snacks in the after¬noon and dinner in the evening. After Rachel had washed and gone to bed, Miriam made Rachel’s lunch for the following day. It got easier during Rachel’s high school years and easier still when Rachel finally went away to college. When Rachel was graduated, Miriam was sure Rachel would return home until she settled in a career; but Rachel stayed in New York with a man she had met in college.
Except for her husband’s office in the basement and a workbench in the garage, the entire house was Miriam’s domain. She kept a garden where tomatoes and basil grew. She dec¬orated her home with ruffled curtains, potpourri and framed needle¬point. She lined her kitchen drawers and cabinet shelves with con¬tact paper. She was constantly pruning her house: if it wasn’t useful, it wasn’t kept. And if it was kept, it was clean. Miriam let nothing fall to dust.
But her husband disrupted with Miriam’s orderly universe. His efforts to maintain their house coated her things in drywall dust or seeded her floors with mud and grass clippings. He washed his grubby hands in the guest bathroom and dried them with her good towels. He drained motor oil into her spaghetti pot. He rinsed paint¬brushes in the kitchen sink.
Miriam did her best but slowly things started to come apart. Though he had been there a thousand times, Miriam’s husband got lost around Cuyahoga Falls. He looped down and around Routes 77 and 76 and 277; he found Akron but thought it was too far, knew it had to be too far, so he circled back. Though he’d left at nine, he couldn’t find his client’s office for an eleven o’clock appoint¬ment. At around noon, he pulled into a rest stop and spread a map across his dashboard. But he could make no sense of it. The reticulated lines and colored marks and place names blurred and sharpened with the welling and wiping of water from his eyes. He was lost and utterly alone.
He missed other appointments. He began losing accounts. One Tuesday Miriam’s husband wandered home early to say that he had been fired at the age of sixty-eight.
“I feel like a kind of picture that’s fading,” he said. “Like I’m get¬ting smaller and farther away…” Miriam became frightened.
His search for work found nothing. When his severance pay started to run out Miriam returned to the job she had left when Rachel was born. The people, the layout of the shop floor, the fixtures in the bathroom, even the color of the cinder block walls were just as she had left them almost thirty years ago. Old colleagues greeted Miriam by name and asked after her family. Miriam was at a disad¬vantage; everyone was familiar but shifted somehow. It was as though she had awakened from a coma over three decades long.
Meanwhile, Miriam got the former regional sales director a job as a greeter at a local discount store. She bought him a small purse and filled it each evening with money and a list of what she would allow it to buy. For more detailed instructions she got him a notebook. She packed his lunch the night before and dropped him off on the way to her job. She sewed a note on the inside of his coat that gave his name and her address and her phone number.
But soon he could not be left alone; Miriam had to take him everywhere. She took him to the supermarket and let him push the cart.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.
“You know where it is,” she said. She was not thinking.
An aisle later he said: “I have to go to the bathroom.” Miriam said nothing; she was considering frozen food.
At the back of the store, through a pair of heavy plastic doors, tile gave way to blotched concrete. He wandered among palettes of groceries, stacked twelve or more feet high. He climbed a staircase and stood puzzled on the landing.
Miriam heard the announcement: they had found her husband. She finished her shopping; she loaded the belt. She waited for the cashier to ring her out and she watched the cashier bag her groceries and load her cart. She wheeled her cart to her car and loaded her groceries in the trunk. Miriam had other errands and briefly, very briefly, she considered driving on but instead she returned to claim her husband. He was standing in the corner of an office in the front of the store. They would not let him put his wet pants on a chair.
The staff at the ‘adult care center’ assured Miriam that her husband would receive the ‘very best care.’ They showed her his semi-private room and the common room and the cafeteria. Miriam hurriedly signed the papers and went back to reclaim her home.
Rachel and Reuben lived in a shoebox on the lower east side, a diorama with thin cardboard walls. The two were placed this late Sunday morning as they were each Sunday morning: Rachel on a sofa cushion on the floor reading the Book Review; Reuben reading the Week in Review at the dinette table. Once- or twice-read sections of the Sunday paper spread like overnighters across the room. The untouched sports and classified sections would remain untouched. The magazine’s weeklong crossword waited to be mutually solved.
Kind of Blue played and finished playing and played again and Rachel hated that. Reuben always took a good thing and relived it to death. She used to love this music back when Reuben first introduced her to it but now its power to call up their early days was gone.
Reuben drained the last of his coffee. “Did you let your mother know you will be in town next week?” he said.
“I won’t be ‘in town.’ I’ll be in Pittsburgh.”
“I thought you were going to drive up to Cleveland to see your father.”
“That was your plan,” Rachel said without looking up. “I told you I am not sure I’m interested in driving two and a half hours out of my way.”
“How’s your father doing?” Reuben continued.
“I am sure he’s fine.”
“When did you last speak to your mother?”
“I don’t know… Last week.”
“You didn’t speak to your mother last week.”
“Did so.” She had not. Rachel avoided calling her mother. She tired of hearing what a burden her father had become. Or, what an angel her mother had become.
Neither had looked up from their reading. Only their lips moved.
“You would have told me if you called your mother. You would have mentioned how your father is doing.”
“I wouldn’t have told you because there is no change, absolutely no change. My father is the same as he has been.”
There was a pause. “I can’t find Arts & Leisure,” Rachel said. “Do you have it?”
“No. I finished with it and gave it to you.”
“Well, it’s not here.”
Reuben got up from the table and rummaged through the sections piled around Rachel. He picked out the Arts & Leisure section and tossed it on the coffee table.
“It was here all along,” he said.
The phone rang too long. Rachel was about to hang up.
“Hey, Ma. It’s me, Rachel.”
“Oh, hello, baby.”
“I’m coming to Cleveland, Ma.”
“Oh, don’t do that, dear. I mean, you don’t have to do that. Everything is fine.”
“I’m not coming for you, Ma. I’m going to be in town for a teacher’s conference anyway and I thought I should see Dad.”
“That’s not necessary, baby. Your father’s alright. He doesn’t even miss you. He won’t even recognize you. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not worried about it. I am coming to town and I want to do this. I want to see my father.”
“Okay, okay. Do you know where it is? Do you want the address?”
“Wouldn’t you be coming, too?”
“No.”
“No…? Mom,” Rachel said. “What’s going on?”
There was a pause, dead air on the line. “Rachel, I love your father but I am tired. I am tired of visiting someone who doesn’t acknowledge me. Every time I go I ask him if he knows who I am and …”
“They told you not to ask him if he knows who you are…”
“…and all I get back is a blank stare. It kills me…”
“…You know it makes him sad.”
“…It’s painful. He’s forgotten all of the details of our life and I am tired of reminding him. He asks questions but I’ve stopped answering him anymore. Each time he asks about his father I have to tell him his father’s dead. And then he gets this incredibly sad and confused look on his face and starts peppering me with a thousand questions: When did he die? Why didn’t anyone tell him? What did he die of? I have to explain each time.” Miriam sighed and caught her breath. “He doesn’t even know what death is, I think. When I tell him his father has died, he asks, ‘Doesn’t he remember me anymore?’
“Plus, he’s got a girlfriend,” Miriam blurted.
“What…? Who? Dad? Ma, he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
“I went to see him three weeks ago and he was holding hands with some woman.”
“Oh, come on, Ma. That’s ridiculous. So what? So he’s holding someone’s hand. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Look, Rachel. I’m not going to discuss it. It is tiring visiting him. He doesn’t know me; he doesn’t recognize me. He barely talks to me and when he does he doesn’t make any sense. It is a waste of my time. I won’t sit with a man who doesn’t care for me while he is holding some other woman’s hand. If you come, you come. Come see me. You can even stay with me. But I won’t go with you to watch your father with another woman.”
“Ma, you’re being stupid.”
“I told you I won’t discuss it. You are welcome here. You are always welcome here but I won’t discuss your father anymore.”
“Well, I’ll be staying at a hotel in any case…”
The voice on the answering machine was … who was that? David… David Mohren? Rachel replayed the message; she had missed the details.
“Hello, Rachel. It’s David Mohren from Shaker Heights. Your mother tells me that you will be in Cleveland. She gave me your phone number. I’d love to say ‘hi’ when you are in town.”
Rachel took down his email address and his phone number and erased the message from their machine.
The teachers’ conference was on Saturday in Pittsburgh. Rachel flew into Cleveland and checked into her hotel on Thursday afternoon. Rachel unpacked, putting her clothes in drawers and on the rod in the bathroom she hung a black dress with small, white polka dots. She turned on the hot shower and closed the bathroom door to let the steam smooth the folds of her dress. She didn’t call her mother; she would call her on Friday morning and take her to visit her father late morning or early Friday afternoon. She planned to be in Pittsburgh to meet her colleagues by Friday night. She pushed off her shoes with her toes. She fell back on the bed and fell asleep in her clothes.
Rachel’s call and her approaching visit got Miriam thinking: she would purge the house. She would clear the house of everything that wasn’t hers. If that weren’t enough, she would consider selling the house.
Surprisingly there was little to pack up. Rachel must have taken all of her things when she left for college or when she left to live with Reuben. Her husband’s things were easy to find; the list of places they would be was short: in the garage, in his closets and bureau drawers, in his night table and in his basement office.
His office was a desk, a chair, a file cabinet, and a small bookcase in an open area of the basement. Miriam packed his books into boxes. She dumped pages and papers from the file cabinet into a trash bin without reading them. In the corner a milk crate held what was left of her husband’s record collection. Miriam thought she had tossed their old LPs. She flipped through the albums, pausing over cover art, re-reading liner notes. Remembering the music, recalling albums that were no longer there.
Miriam sat in her husband’s chair and checked the drawers of his desk: more paper, more trash. On the desk blotter was an old utility bill. Her husband had traced the letters of the address with a pencil and filled a sheet of unlined paper with fragments of his name and their full address. There was a phone on the desk,—when did he put in another phone line? Miriam thought—an old coffee can holding pens and pencils with their ends chewed jagged—he chewed his pencils?—and a large, framed picture of their small family. Torn scraps of paper were taped to the glass, labels written in a shaky hand over the erased traces of earlier tries: ‘Rachel’ ‘me’ ‘Miriam (wife)’
In their bedroom, Miriam took shoes from the bottom of his closet and put them in the bottom of a plastic garbage bag. She put the clothes from his bureau on top of the shoes. The clothes from the closet she left on their hangers and brought them into the living room. In his night table she found old birthday cards and Valentine’s Day cards and hand-written notes wrapped in a shoelace. There were buttons and bits of thread. An old pocket watch missing its crystal. A pocketknife. Pennies and paperclips. A notebook with her husband’s name and address on the inside cover and the stub of a pencil, its gnawed metal end missing its eraser, attached to the notebook by a short length of string.
Over a number of days, Miriam studied the notebook like a map. She found familiar places and places she hadn’t seen or even imagined were there. She struggled to find her husband but often the details were too thin: Her own notes to her husband: checklists of things that he needed to do and steps listed for each task; directions from the store to the bus stop, from the bus stop to home; and pages of her husband’s own notes: lists of the dates and times and places he was and things he did and people he spoke with and when and about what; diagrams and drawings of everyday things: a sketch of a light switch, the floor plan of her house, the outline of a faucet handle; page after page in progressively anemic detail: the later pages scattered with num¬bers, random phrases and ciphers. Abstract pictures. It was a book written by a man who, like Zeno, was dying by halves.
Miriam found her husband’s last appointment book and a pocket atlas of the greater Cleveland area. The atlas was fairly new, purchased toward the end of his sales career and at the beginning of his end. She fanned through the appointment book: names, dates, notes and minutes of meetings. No entries beyond the date he was let go except for a short note on the penultimate page. So know I now I am dead… it began.
Her buzzing cell phone woke her: David calling from the lobby. Rachel had planned on showering and making up her face just a little before meeting David; now she was scrambling just to get dressed. Rachel washed her face and quickly ran a damp washcloth under her armpits. She rubbed a small dollop of toothpaste over her teeth with the tip of her finger. She put on a slip. She tested the fabric of her dress: it was damp from the steam but she wore it anyway; she had no other. A last-minute adjustment she made to her reflection in the doors of the descending elevator: Not too bad, Rachel thought.
David sat at the bar, sipping a club soda. He rose when he saw Rachel approach.
“Hello, Rachel,” he put out his hand. Rachel hugged David and David replied with a kiss on her cheek.
“Hello, David. How’ve you been?”
“You look great.”
“Thank you,” Rachel said.
“Want a drink?”
“Um, sure. White wine.” Rachel thought a glass of wine would set the right tone.
“So,” David began the evening, “How’ve you been? What have you been doing? Still married?”
“Yes. Still married about fifteen years now.”
“I remember the invitation.”
“Yes. Too bad you couldn’t make it. And you? Still married?”
“Alas, no,” David said. He lowered his eyes in mock humility. “I have been divorced for about three years now.”
“That’s too bad,” Rachel offered. Rachel remembered now or thought she remembered a mention of his divorce, maybe from her mother.
“It’s okay. It was kind of my fault. You remember how I was.”
Rachel did remember. She actually loved those days with David when they were both fearless and full of life.
“So what are you doing now?” Rachel asked.
“I run the service station now. I’ve added a used-car dealership in the lot next door. It’s doing well; it’s okay.”
David had worked in his dad’s service station. He played hockey in high school and got a scholarship to a college in Boston. After college a professional club picked him up. His father gave David two years to make a go of it. David stretched this into four but still couldn’t prove to his father that hockey was more than an extension of his adolescence. So, as agreed, David came home to run the business.
Rachel remembered David’s love for hockey and the scholarship that sent him to Boston. That is where she lost him. She moved New York, he to Boston. When the holidays colluded in sending them both back to Cleveland, they always made plans that somehow didn’t work out.
David drove them to a dimly lighted restaurant with fixtures of wood and brass. Rachel ordered another glass of wine; David another club soda.
They began lining up the events of their lives. Their trajectories after high school were similar—college, marriage, no children. David’s marriage ended while Rachel’s continued on. David had hinted his drinking was the cause of his divorce. Rachel wouldn’t have asked David directly but somehow the topic came around anyway.
“Alcohol had something to do with it, I’m sure, but you can’t blame it all on drinking. I certainly was despicable in those days. You remember. But some of it was also the travel. When I was playing hockey, I was away almost all of the time. It is hard to make a marriage work if your husband isn’t around. And when I was around, I was drinking and when I was drinking, I wasn’t really around, if you know what I mean.”
In the past, at that point in the evening Rachel and David would have been well into their second or third bottle of wine. It wasn’t unusual for the two of them to run through four or more bottles. Now David was sober and their evening had a different tone. Rachel had noticed.
“But you don’t drink anymore,” Rachel said.
“No.”
“What happened? Are you official? I mean, are you an official alcoholic or are you just ‘practicing moderation’?”
David smiled at Rachel’s directness. “No, nothing ‘official.’ I just saw where it was going and decided to stop.”
“So would it set you off if you had a drink with me?”
“Set me off? Probably not. I would just rather not.” David stretched his hand across the table. “It is better to keep a clear head and enjoy the evening.” Rachel stared at David’s hand. It lay on its back, palm up, its fingers twitched like the legs of a dying beetle.
“So tell me about your wife. Where’d you meet her? In college, I assume.”
David said his wife’s name. “Yeah, you know I was a ‘jock,’ I suppose, and hung out with the guys on the hockey team and the guys on the football team, who were some of the same guys. And Amanda hung around that crowd, too. I don’t really remember when I first met her or when we started to go out. She just seemed part of that scene and she and I were gradually dating. Just like that. I think at one time or another Amanda dated each of us.” David said his wife’s name again but Rachel didn’t catch it.
“Mandy?”
“Amanda,” David corrected her.
“That’s strange,” Rachel said.
“Yeah, I guess. It is and it isn’t. In some ways it was the most natural thing. I had signed with a team in my senior year, before I graduated. Amanda married me and we got an apartment, the works. All those things. Kind of like we were ticking off a checklist: College, check. Marriage, check…”
“I know what you mean. I sometimes feel like a token on a game board. I’m waiting for someone to roll the dice so I can move ahead. I’m always hoping for doubles but end up with snake-eyes.” Rachel finished her wine.
David smiled.
“Kids?” Rachel asked, though she knew there weren’t any.
“Anyway, I was away a lot with the team. In a lot of ways, my college days didn’t really end. I just took them on the road.”
Rachel ordered another glass of wine.
“Kids?” David suddenly heard her question. “No. No kids, though we did talk about it.”
“Really? You wanted kids?”
“Well, we talked about it…”
“I didn’t think you wanted kids. I didn’t think you even liked kids.”
“I never said I didn’t want kids. I love kids.”
“Really? You didn’t seem like…”
“Really,” David assured her. “I just didn’t want kids while I was in college.”
“Oh, I agree. But you didn’t not want kids, either.”
“What…?”
Rachel felt a little dizzy. “Nothing. It’s nothing. It was a long time ago. Forget it,” Rachel said.
“No. I think it is good that this came up. Rachel, I am sorry for what happened and for how I treated you. It wasn’t your fault, not entirely.”
“My fault? It wasn’t at all my fault at all. We got pregnant. When I told you I was pregnant, you were… let’s say, you were less than thrilled. I thought you’d be happy but you were miserable. It was like I told you somebody died; it’s like you died. I thought it would be perfect for us. But you didn’t want to have the baby. It was obvious. But you wouldn’t tell me you didn’t want the baby. You couldn’t tell me what you wanted. I only wanted for us to be together, for us to be happy.” Rachel was sobbing. More quietly she added, “You should have come with me to New York. We could have made it work.”
“Rachel. Let’s just forget it. There is nothing to say. It is all in the past. We can’t do anything about it. Please. Let’s forget it.”
“Forget it…” she murmured.
Rachel ran her fingertips over the lip of her glass. She began to rummage through her bag, looking for nothing. She excused herself and left the table. When she returned neither spoke for a while.
“So tell me,” David asked. “What’s your story?”
Rachel looked at David. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“What?”
Rachel sighed and began her narrative in a professional, almost clinical tone. She felt distant, like she was telling someone else’s story.
“I met Reuben in college. He was from California and was in his last year when I started college. He had been in New York already and knew the galleries and bars and places to be. He had friends who were incredibly young with studio apartments and ‘artsy’ jobs. Before I finished my undergraduate degree, he had an apartment and a job. He got me a job working in a community college as a TA while I worked on my masters. We got married and we’ve been living in his apartment ever since. He’s black.”
“Black?” It was an odd detail, out of place. David thought he misheard.
“Well, half-Black. His mother was black… is black.”
“Okay,” David said flatly.
“Yeah. It didn’t go over well with my parents when we started living together. With my mother, actually. It got a little better when we got married.”
“I see,” David said. “How is your mother?”
“She’s okay. I am going to see her tomorrow. Really to see my dad. He’s in a home now…”
“I heard.”
“He has been slipping away for a while now.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Excuse me,” Rachel said. She left the table for the ladies’ room.
David pulled up in front of the hotel.
“Would you like to come in for a nightcap?”
David smiled. “No. No, thank you.”
“Really? Not just one? I’m sure they haven’t run out of club soda.” She smiled.
“No, thank you. I should go.”
“Go? Where do you need to get to?”
“Listen, Rachel,” David said. He shut off the car and turned to Rachel.
“David, why did you invite me out tonight?” Rachel asked.
“What?” For a moment David was derailed. “Rachel, look: I am getting my life together after letting it go for a long, long time. I wanted to see you again to apologize…”
“…apologize…?”
“…for the way it was when we were together. The way we were together. The things I did to hurt you.”
“David, you never hurt me.” Rachel lied.
“Didn’t I? I am sure that I did. You were a beautiful thing in my life and I didn’t really appreciate that at the time. At the very least, let me say that.”
“David, are you dying?” she asked.
David laughed. “No, I’m not dying.”
“David, why don’t you come in? Why don’t you at least sit with me in the lobby for a while?”
“Thanks, Rachel. But it is too late. I should have… we might have been happy but it’s too late now. I am sorry that we… that I wasted that time of our lives.”
The room giggled and teased Rachel. It spun away when she closed her eyes, stood frozen when they opened. Rachel kicked off her pumps and fell back on the bed as though dropped from David’s arms. Her right hand fell to her lap, to the point around which the room seemed to turn; she wrapped the weight of her leg over her hand and pressed the tulle of a prom dress into her pelvis. A younger David was there, gliding through layers of gauzy fabric, over her smooth thigh and round cheek, his fingers finding her lips and slipping into her from behind.
It was a moment she lived before but never with such purpose: to conceive the child that would anchor David to her life. But the idea of a baby frightened him so she got rid of it. But that wasn’t right either. Rachel was lost between presence and absence. She moaned in a sudden flood of sadness, not for the child she let go but for the love that the child had tainted: the child whose life would have ruined everything some¬how ruined everything anyway.
Rachel saw the boxes as she pulled up: boxes on the porch packed with miscellany, with books, books, and magazines; a trophy-top bowler immobilized mid-arm swing; a wood plaque upon the occasion of her father’s ‘retirement.’ Inside the front door she found bags of clothes and suits and shirts still on their hangers draped over the back of the sofa. On the dining room table a milk crate held about twenty albums; a phono¬graph was spinning an old vinyl record. Rachel found her mother sip¬ping coffee at the kitchen table. In her mind, Miriam stepped through each room of her house, taking inventory of what needed fixing, wondering how she let things get so, how she came to be in this kitchen, in this moment.
“Ma, what’s up with all the boxes?” Rachel said.
Miriam drained the last of her coffee. “Those are your father’s things. I am throwing them away. I left them out for you to take a look at in case you wanted any of it.” Miriam cleared away her coffee cup and wiped down the dinette table.
“Things? I don’t need any of his things.”
“I thought maybe Reuben. Especially the suits. Could Reuben use some of your father’s suits?”
“Ma, they’re not even the same size.”
“Okay. Then I’ll put them in the trash.” Miriam put on her coat. “Let’s just go.”
At the center, Rachel looked around for her father but Miriam already knew where he was: seated beside a woman who rested her head on his shoulder. Rachel stood in front of her father. “Dad?” she said.
Her father looked up at her then down at his hand knotted in the hand of another. He pulled her fingers back with the pinch of his thumb and forefinger, a giant picking out the sticks of a collapsed home. The woman squeezed his hand and suddenly smiled at him and smiled more broadly at him, showing all her teeth. She was wetting herself. Urine soaked through her gown and splashed in a growing puddle around her feet and the legs of her chair.
“Oh, God,” Rachel said. “Can we get a mop over here?” She called for a member of the staff, who led the woman away. Another staff member pulled her chair away and blotted blue, absorbent paper on the spill. Rachel’s father watched without interest.
Miriam was suddenly beside her husband and touched his shoulder. Her husband turned toward her. “Do you know who I am?” Miriam asked. He looked confused; he opened his mute lips. Though he meant to say something else, he said, “Where have you been?”
“I was here all along,” Miriam said. She touched his hand shyly. “Where have you been?”
So know I now that I am dead. My best is happened and my future has to be less than now. My future is nameless things and thingless names. And I will be one of these things unknown and unnamed. My life is loosing its mooring. I am but I don’t know where; soon I won’t know who.
Soon even this thought will go and along with it any regrets. Time wasted and wasted opportunities to love or feel or create or live and I cannot hope of doing or undoing or redoing any of it. My future won’t let me.
I will be, simply be. Thinking without saying, knowing without thinking, being without being.
I am writing this now before my future strikes me dumb.
I already miss my wife. I wonder where she’s gone all these years…
