Shortly after I wrote in my journal Jacob and I made a late dinner. Quietly, resolutely we ate together. The suffocating disappointment of Friday's outcome still hanging over our heads made things tense, an unwelcome feeling for me now. Halfway through the meal I looked up only to discover Jacob was sitting there making silly faces at me. I laughed so hard. We made up. Okay, not exactly true. We made up in his dining room chair in various states of undress because going upstairs would have taken too long.That's part of an entry from June of 2006 published here once upon a time and now offline with the rest of my archives because I have paranoid tendencies for such a public journaler.
Here's where I point out when he was unzipping my dress he heard a creak. I told him it must be the cat. We continued on. That chair was fun.
Until we decided to return from heaven and we both saw Ben standing in the doorway watching us. Leaning in the doorway, because he had been standing there for a good ten minutes taking in the flesh-for-fantasy lottery. He struck Bridget gold. He saw everything. All of it.
Most people would have been embarrassed and left hastily. Ben? He stayed to watch the show. Which pretty much destroyed the already shaky ground he occupied in Jacob's good graces, because Jake hated the offhand comments Ben would make at any given opportunity. Or the lingering looks if my strap slid or the wind swirled my skirt. Jake always said that Cole and Ben were likeminded individuals.
There are moments in life that haunt me and I am not the only one. For Ben there are two moments in our history that he would like to permanently alter and this is one of them, told to me in a waterfall confession of tears and frustration and utter despair. This one moment where he says he stood in that doorway and he simply couldn't move. He knew it was wrong and he knew he was't welcome and he was frozen to his place while his head went off-leash. He stood there and burned me to his memory forever, every last detail of what I looked like in the throes of bliss because he wanted to be the one making that memory.
This weekend he tried to take that memory from me and I won't allow it. Not to be a dealbreaker, instead he thinks he'll wear me down and he doesn't seem to hear me when I tell him he can't because the walls around those memories aren't wooden, they're forged steel and he can't make them into matchsticks, he'll only get hurt fighting to dent or scratch them.
He will get hurt and I can stand in front of him and block his path and put forth a courage I don't think I can back up but it won't serve to do anything more than make me realize that for all his reminders to live in the moment, to just be, he isn't doing it either. He is not taking his own advice and half the time, I really don't know what to do with Ben. I wouldn't hurt him, really I wouldn't, but that one moment he can't take.
There's no making up, either. In a few hours he's on a plane back to work and we have to just leave it swinging between us, dropped on both sides because we can't get around it so we'll have to resort to stepping over or ducking under for a while to come.
Makes me sad, you know. It makes me sad to think that after all this death and all this crap we've gone through, he could still be so sickeningly jealous of a ghost.