clare
My hands are always searching. My lips scatter kisses into the snowglobe outside and blow them through the windows. On summer nights when the sheets stick to my skin and wrinkle, I walk out on the balcony without reaching for clothes. Some nights, my eyes fill with water and pain before they close above the heart of a strange man who does not smell like you, who does not feel as soft as you, whom I do not love and who will never love me like you do. On one of those nights, the dark man who has loved me for three weeks asks me to marry him. You have been sick for nine months now. He tells me that this is not living, this waiting for you; he calls this waiting to die. I think to myself: Nine months and I have already found myself another man. He asks me to go to Chiapas with him to live with the Zapatistas and fight for justice. My fingers tremble: What if you wake up and I am gone? But the dream comes to me again, the one where I am free. Surely guilt and hatred will not follow me all the way to 12 Mexico. And what is here for me? Not even you – just the outline of the living that used to be, and the aching. So I kiss him and promise to leave the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow comes as always and I am back at your side, forever at your side. I allow my fingers to play in your hair and it slips like silk through them. I nuzzle my nose to your nose, pull your hands to my breasts, and try to remember the feeling of our bodies intertwining. I talk to myself now: This is no way to live. I cannot. You would not want me to. Somehow I will love you from across oceans. This lover – the one I will run away with tomorrow – he likes the way my hair curls around my chin. That night, I pack my bags and line up my shoes by the door. I take a slow bath, letting the water run cold by the end. I pack your things into two boxes and tape them shut. I sweep the floors, clean
out the cupboards and try to make the bed. But by now, my hands are shaking and my stomach is crawling up under my lungs and my bronchials burn with every breath I take down. I push myself off of the bed and throw my clothes on the floor. Ripping open one of the boxes with your things, I pull out a sweater that still smells like you used to before the hospital; I wrap myself up in it, climb into the bed, and wait for you to bring me tea like you used to. I am still waiting when the phone rings. It slips out of my hands when I grab it – I was crying, and my hands were wet – and I have to chase the phone across the wooden floor. ‘Hello?’ I breathe into the phone without knowing if it is my dark and strange lover, the one from last month, a wrong number, or you. ‘Ma’am? This is the hospital at Bihar. Your husband is awake.’ My body moves faster than my mind. I am running for the door, forgetting my keys, grabbing a scarf and coming for you. My mind takes snapshots: the blur of the line of shoes, the banging echo of the stairs, the sagging of my clothes from August’s monsoon rain and the moonlight. My heart remembers the rest: the guilt strangling me, the love paralysing me, the agony of what I might one day have to tell you twisting up inside of me. And then the doorway. I stand there, my lungs pounding against my ribcage, and stare at you. You loved me when you saw me then, loved me all over again. ‘I remember you kissing my forehead,’ you tell me, ‘and I remember you holding my hand.’ And then I am on the floor by your bedside, the tears flowing, the doctors saying that it is a miracle of love, and me believing that the biggest miracle is that you can still love me back.