I've been thinking, as I often do when ill, about what remains, about remainders, about clay columns of pipes, china doll heads, singleton chess pieces, sea glass, transferware fragments, all sorts of shards that line the water's edge....all the pieces I looked for once, what remains after the descent into the river of grief. What remains of me? I miss Harvey, and yet I fell in love again. And came up gasping. I was immersed. And I need the sky. And I need souvenirs, something that shows I came, I saw, I loved.
I think I fought so fiercely against the Pretty Boy and longed to lean into his embrace simultaneously, because he's probably my last love.
I told him goodbye. Months ago. I stopped taking his calls.
And I waited for my life to go on. And it did. In a mosaic sort of way: Start. Smash. Rebuild out of the pieces.
For the past week, out of nowhere, I fell apart. I fell into fever, into shaking chills, into the topography of crimson rashes and a purple-as-the-center-of-Queen-Anne's lace breast lesion, into the arms of the ER doctor and into my sickbed. Friends had to teach for me; co-workers had to cover my shifts; my father had to drive me to a doctor's appointment. I had scarlet fever. I had a MRSA infection without any visible signs of a cut. I had a breast lesion that required multiple biopsies (and my sister died of breast carcinoma, with symptoms like this). My hair changed texture. The soles of my feet and the tips of my fingers peeled away, like onionskin. The skin over my whole body sloughed. I had shingles--a raspberry patch over my left scapula.
Today, after 10 days of antibiotics, I'm weak but otherwise fine. My biopsies were negative, although I have another one scheduled after the rash, just to be sure. There's nothing but bruising on my breast to indicate I was ever ill. (And eight pounds disappeared from somewhere--but I cannot see where). My skin looks better than ever. And yet, I'm falling apart.
During that time of extreme illness, somehow he knew I was ill. Somehow he knew I was afraid of dying, as my sister did, from a breast cancer that was diagnosed out of nowhere. And he knew just when to call, and he knew just what to say: You lose your breast? I still love you. And You lose your hair? I still love you. You love me and all my hair fall out, right? And he researched reconstruction and trompe-l'oueil nipple tattooing, and he said all the right things, in the broken English and that Badenov accent, and oh my god he is so pretty.
And the guy whom I've been seeing? He found out I was sick and had to have a breast biopsy and broke it off with me. Not a word, not a text, not a phone call in days. I guess he's gone to BOOBS R US to look for a new sweetheart.
Today, after thinking about love and loss and the likelihood of ever being someone else's baby, I've decided. I'm making something new out of something old.
I'm 55, and I'm tired of running. I'm staying put in my house with my daughter for at least the next two years. No more fantasies of moving to Nashville, to Norfolk, to a teaching job of my dreams. It's here for two years.
He's 43 and moving to Norway for five years (long-term job, leaving right before Thanksgiving). He has no furlough for months.
You are the love of my whole damned life, he tells me.
The love of my life died, I tell him.
I lost my wife and my son, he tells me. I won't lose you.
You don't have me, I tell him.
I have you repeatedly, he tells me.
Can you dial 1-800-IMPASSE?
He's a conundrum: innovative, intuitive lover; maddening, jealous fiend. The only letter he ever wrote to me was 3-1/2 pages on how Barack Obama saved the American economy, and one sentence about my eyes blue as fjords.
He's economically dishonest but emotionally honest, and that's another conundrum.
Next week we say goodbye to something, if not farewell, with food and flowers and physicality that I thought had ended with Harv. (As the French say, formidable. As he says, хуй его знает).
After that? I have no idea. All I know is that I don't know how to feel this way. I have forgotten how to feel.
I think of the artificial songbird from "The Emperor and the Nightingale." I sing her song. What's left of love is a locket that won't stay shut. What's left of my heart is a sprung gear.
What do I make of this?
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