Yesterday was a hiccup rescued with a lifeline fed continuously and generously down the side of the mountain to where I dangled, not sure if the effort of holding on was worth the thought of letting go. The white knuckle grip was beginning to ache and the tension ran like an electric current through the branch I was holding, threatening to blow me off in volts instead.
I had one Vicodin and one vodka on the rocks and then when we sat down with the children draped all over Ben to watch Inkheart I was asleep in seconds. Woke up a few times to see that I was missing an amazing movie and then it was finished, and Ben took the dog out, I took the kids to bed and we rendezvoused on the couch once again to watch Push. Except this time I didn't see much of anything, out instantly and finally my eyes opened to find him watching me.
What are you doing?
Watching you sleep.
He led me to bed and boom, out again. I slept from before midnight until six, when Bonham started his morning bark, and then he stopped and I fell asleep again until eight. Restorative, deep sleep free of nightmares, ghosts, anxiety or fear, oddly enough. Selfishly because Bridget wouldn't choose and so it was chosen for me. Sleep. Then everything else will sort itself out.
Ben flies out late tonight and it will probably be the last time I see him until the second week of September. He thinks I can't hear him when he talks in the Bridget-proof low tones to the others but sometimes I catch just enough and it breaks my heart because I know he'll say he'll try to get back soon, to provide the loft that might keep my hopes up. I know it's going to be hard. I know the other boys are here doing everything they can to fill in as guards, dads, carpenters, jar-openers, affection-dispensers and moral support posts you couldn't knock down with a bulldozer.
It's just that they're not Ben.
And that matters. So very very much.
I'm going to miss him. But I'm going to be very busy with finishing more stories and training Bonham up to be a good puppy, keeping the children busy with their bicycles and sidewalk chalk and library books and playing confessor and surrogate wife for my boys as they form the calm around my storm, as much support for them, I hope, as they are for me. Just in different ways.
What's left of the summer will be spent quietly, in the shade of the porch on the painted floor, with a pencil and a cellphone and a blank sheet of paper, a glass tumbler full of fresh blueberries to one side for snacking and a glass pendant hung on the screen door handle when it became too warm to wear any longer, a memory on a string of our week in Venice and the endless glass shops we combed to find that tiny orb with the green flower inside.
When the sun goes down the tiny white lights will twinkle on, one string at a time, and the words will flow out into the darkness and hopefully reach his ears, and he will find a way to weave his musings into song, because we simply never ever waste a word anymore.
Goodbye sweetheart. Tucker. Benjamin. I love you. Come back to me soon.
