Freezing, Forgetting
I met him during a blizzard. He was a dancer too. The way he moved on stage was as if he was walking on water. So smooth, and so controlled gliding across the boards. The words flooded through the speakers to his body and into my thoughts. Our eyes met, 20 feet away. He was holding a shovel when we met. He asked me to dance. I told him I would, after he removed all of the snow.
We fell in love in the sunshine. I kept all of the letters he wrote and read them on my porch swing. He wrote the most beautiful words about dreams, fears, and futures. He said he knew love when we met and looked forward to every letter I wrote. I wrote because I missed him. I wrote because my heart ached for him. I always read his letters alone, in the sunshine, in fear of another knocking on my door.
The sun was still shining when he walked through my door. I traced his every outline as though perfection lived in every imperfect pore. We made maps in the freckles of our skin, roads of a life we’d one day make. Our breaths matched as though we were one and I fell more in love with each lungful of air. Night fell and he lay next to me dreaming of futures. It was dark and I missed him. So I leaned over to my night stand and tapped the light once. Changing my mind, I tapped it twice more and it went off. His face was painted in the moonlight. Dreaming.
We built a home together. A home with a picket white fence and the mailbox with no name because we still had two. The sun occasionally burned too hot, but that’s love. We liked the idea of a garden. The growth of the flowers represented the growth of our life together. So, we planted the seeds next to the window and watered them everyday. He did things like fix the leaky faucet and hang the Christmas lights. I cleaned and prepared the meals that we ate at our four person table by the bay window. It was at that same table I told him about our baby.
The sun was still shining when I tried to ignore the cool breeze on my skin. He was at work doing things to make money. I was at home doing things to make a home. Our house almost felt like a home without a name on the mailbox. Letters came for two different people who now shared a baby girl. I rubbed my stomach and filled up the water pail. I had almost forgot to water our life. He came home as I was watering. He stopped and pointed and I said the cosmos bloomed. He asked what a cosmos was. I said it was our flower. He asked me what a flower was as though he had forgotten.
“…there, the one that’s blooming” I said while pointing.
He said he’d never seen that flower before. Our flower. And I said, I know.
And the snow came. I was outside shoveling. He was inside shaking. Our baby and I, still shoveling. At night, I’d sleep defeated next to what used to be a warm body in my bed. Now, it was cold and damp as if buried in the snow. The same snow that I’d been shoveling with our baby. The same snow I had been dreading from the day our eyes met. My arm reached out as if to save him from the blizzard, but he was gone. I was alone. And then she kicked, so I got out of bed and walked to the window to pull back the shades. I smiled. The sun was still shining.