Lover's Patience

This morning I awoke and you were gone. The bed felt too big in your absence, a vast, soft acreage. Heigh ho the dairy-o, the cheese stands alone. My flesh shrinks from the edges where the cold has gathered; in sympathy, I imagine, with your flesh flinching from the cold boards. I lie in the smothering darkness listening for the flush of the toilet, the muffled pad of your tip-toeing feet. I torture myself, splayed in our bed, my extremities tethered by those cold corners, imagining you missing, what I would miss. Not to feel your skin beneath my fingertips, each silken patch and whorled hair a braille ode. Not to hear your breath as it sighs from your lips, a comforting murmur that echoes in my ear suctioned to your cheek as we embrace. Not to smell your musk, sweetly sour, beneath the swelling, budding base notes of your cologne like a humid breeze sweeping beneath the canopy of an exotic forest. Not to see your smile, that brilliant wattage of happiness that lends itself around a room, as infectious as a yawn. Not to have that magical sense of you, like a lingering caress, as warm and tactile as clasped hands, that connects us even across a crowd.

I wait for the dull ping of the light bulb blinking off, or the sigh of the fridge door closing. I wait for you. I shuffle through memories, plucking incidents at random, bright as new-minted playing cards: your first words to me, our first kiss, our first fight, the last time I made you laugh, the time you showed me my telephone number pencilled on your bedside table, the time you first tasted my Honey Mustard Chicken, the first time you held me while I cried, your expression when I remembered bubble-gum pop princess Debbie Gibson, the last time we spent the entire day in bed together. I lay them out in ranks, overlapping, matching emotions. Lover's Patience. I tug these thoughts of you around me, blanket-like, wrap myself in their comfort and curl up on your side of our bed while mine grows cold.

It has been four days since the funeral.

jason