"somewhere other than inside the out there." --part forty three.
i suppose that now is a good time to tell you about his mom.
she's a small lady, but a grand woman.
there was a day in all of this when she and i began to talk about what would happen after. once he woke up, there would be radiation treatments and physical rehab that would take years to replace things that we all begin to learn as infants. eating, walking, talking, remembering, and so on. these are things that he would have to relearn due to the damage done to his brain and muscles.
i had no intention of leaving, not while he was in the hospital, not while he was in rehab, not while he was anything worse or better than he was at that moment.
"there may come times when he doesn't want you there," she said.
and i know now that it took the bravest and most profound woman that i have ever met to say that to me. he was a proud man, and the entire process would be a deeply frustrating and humiliating experience for him. of course, at the time, i was overwhelmed with emotion and not thinking very clearly. though i didn't want to take that statement personally, i did.
his mom is a genius in her own right, quick and sharp. she is overbearing and quiet. beautiful and simple. funny and somber. from the day that i met her, i hoped one day to be a part of her family, her smooth tick tock of a life left partly to chance and partly to extreme planning.
oh, and i was petrified of her. he held her in such esteem and with such a bright candle that i could not imagine ever being good enough for him. somehow, i was. somehow, she accepted me, insanity and bluntness and all.
after she and i talked, i got upset. mind you, it wasn't at her. it had a precise amount of nothing to do with her, but it had everything to do with the very fact that i was sitting in my boy's hospital room having this very discussion. that, yes, i knew, there would come a time when we were all frustrated. but more than that, i wanted that time to come, frustration over sadness. it gave me hope that he would wake up.
i left the hospital, and i walked and walked and walked. i didn't know which way i was going, but i circled around the hospital a few times. i ended up on the bank of the river. i sat on the levee, and i sobbed for what i can only think was an hour or two. i cried out his name, i talked to him, and i eventually fell asleep on the dried and scratchy grass on the side of the hill.
finally, it had sunk in, the possibility that maybe he might not be ok. and here i was, just his girlfriend, my boy unable to speak my name, our future collapsing further as each minute passed by.
november 2002: new orleans was overcast and rainy, as it is wont to be.
his extended family was coming and going. a fury of in and out. with my head a bit frazzled by the motion, i decided it best to skip out on the hotel and start staying at our old place.
i got the keys to his car, and i remember perfectly that first night, alone in our apartment. he was sharing it with a girl we had found on roommates.com or something. she was out of town. i sat on his bed for hours staring at the wall. our cat, soleil, looked at me askance. my paintings were still on the wall. an eight by ten photo of the two of us was framed and hung on the wall above his comic books. i looked in his closet, and i smelled his clothes. i checked my email, and i fell on the floor.
i didn't get up off the floor for a good while, but i laid there when i was done with my crying fit. i watched the dust bunnies roam around the linoleum. i studied the nooks of peel'n'stick tile. i had nowhere to go, and so i stayed on the floor, in the quiet.
that first night, i couldn't bring myself to sleep in his bed, not right away. and so i stayed half the night there on the floor, fully clothed, watching the things that had been dropped before.
somewhere in the middle of the night, i awoke screaming, and i couldn't feel my legs. they had fallen asleep as my hips dug into the hard floor. i crawled into his bed and wrapped his comforter around my head and my body.
i could have died right there, in that place, caterpillar pita of a girl, and i would have not regretted it. i couldn't do any of it without him.
