Someday Fruits

Last night the color was back in your face. It looked like you had pulled the pits from plums and rubbed them along your cheekbones. It was nice. The silk of your hair could have blinded me, its reflection against the light like polished glass. The whites of your eyes were white again, teeth too. 

I thought maybe it had been a full moon but it wasn’t, and anyway, I don’t know shit about what that means. You used to talk a lot about the phases of the moon, the stars’ place, Mercury and its retrograde, but I never really understood anything about what they meant. Maybe I didn’t listen well enough when you talked about things you were passionate about, a considerable regret.

I woke up and didn’t know what year it was, didn’t know who I was either. Took me a good 10 minutes to readjust back into the present. It could’ve been any day of the week. I used to have that problem all the time, waking up and not knowing anything, like my brain was swiped clean in the night. I’d have dreams where I was a kid again and when I woke up, I‘d spend half an hour piecing my life back together, my age, what my job was, whose bedroom I was in. With you it wasn’t like that. I’d feel your foot kick me in sleep, or your hand searching for my fingers in the middle of the night to grip, and I’d know. Your skin like a furnace on the left side of the sheets, heat coiling under the quilt, reminding where I was. 

Sometimes I sleep well, other times it’s like all of the caffeine I’ve ever consumed in my entire life has suddenly reemerged in my bloodstream. It feels like I’ve never closed my eyes before and I’m trying to learn how for the first time. The task is harder than it should be. 

Remember that time you threw up in my hand? I felt you sit up, heard the gagging coming from your throat and without thought, offered you my open palm. I caught it all, almost perfect. You were laugh-crying as you apologized and I was too, balancing the contents on my way to the bathroom, trying my best not to let any spill over the sides or through my fingers’ cracks. You apologized a million times that night and I kissed you on the head and then the mouth, unbothered by the bile still stuck to your lips. We both knew of the love before then but here it shone, ripe, an obvious bloom.

After we met, I was certain there was nothing you could have done or told me that would have kept me away. I was hooked. My mom asked before she met you, what it was I loved about you, and because I couldn’t articulate an answer, she assumed it wouldn’t stick, that you would be another but not the one. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the answer, but that there were too many possibilities, all of them overlapping with one another, an overwhelming interception of clarity. It’s like being asked your favorite song: a terrible question nobody ever has the answer to. I had a gallery of new music, unending, and there was no correct order to its ranking. I liked it all.

I eventually asked you to move in because six days spent staying over in a week of seven wasn’t enough for me. I wanted the guaranteed return, the shared shower necessities, the fights over who forgot to replenish the toilet paper holder or restock the paper towels. You bought plants for the porch, some already bushes, and seeds to pack into soil in hopes of eventual blossom, someday fruits. On mornings where I left the apartment before you were awake, I’d spend a good fifteen minutes or so taking in the scene: you, a now permanent fixture in a bed we got to call ours, the day’s light sifting in from an exposed gap at the bottom of the blinds, the soft tremor of your eyes under lids. More than once, I couldn’t remember whether or not I had kissed you goodbye before leaving. On those days, I texted for confirmation. Yes, you did, you’d reply, as though you actually remembered. Good, I’d say, still unconvinced.

I didn’t know it could metastasize the way it did. When you first brought it up, I didn’t think much of it at all. Nearly everyone has it nowadays, HPV, it’s what you told me, what your doctor told you. Because there is no way of detecting its existence in men, its specific origins could not be determined, how or when it came to be. Part of me still contemplated possible fault. What if I had shared it unknowingly? You didn’t speak much more about it. The abnormal cells, in a healthy body, have a tendency to dissipate on their own. Yours, scraped out in anticipation, were an unknown that only time could reveal. Maybe it was, at some point, destined to be entirely harmless, never anything more. Sometimes I go crazy thinking about the moment it changed. Was it between bites of pineapple curry from our favorite Thai restaurant two blocks down? Was it during a beach trip, while we welcomed the spilling sun over our vulnerable backs? Was it the middle of the night, tucked comfortably somewhere in between your spine curving against my stomach? The thought tortured me. One day it wasn’t, and then it was.

Parts of our future were quick to become an obvious avoidance. My hand on your lower abdomen, I said, someday I hope we’ll grow ours here. I felt your breath come to a stall, your head turning away from me. I wanted babies. I wanted yours, ours, the same. You couldn’t have them. I said, we’ll find a way. You nodded but kept your head in the other direction and we never revisited the conversation.

I’d read stories about things like this, how one day they don’t exist and the next they’re there, moved in, persistently stable, illness like a flood, pouring the cracks in the hardwood, growing in both density and damage. You were sick before we even knew what to call it. You were sick, without definite cure, and I knew I wanted you for longer than what I was going to get.

It was the size of a baseball when found. It could have been worse, could be a softball, you joked. I didn’t laugh even though you said it so I would. On the drive home from the revelation, I placed my hand on the lower half of your belly, where the cervix, once a quiet existence, now reminded us of its place. You put your palm over mine and pressed.

Because the outside of the body can easily conceal its inner failures, there was a short while where we pretended as though the news hadn’t come as it did, or that maybe it had been wrong. Your face still glowed from a day spent in natural light. As summer arrived, freckles spilled in annual sand over your nose and cheeks. You held onto weight well, no less or more than usual. Your legs maintained a rhythmic skip when stepping. You still looked like you and not someone who could be housing a collection of misguided cells.

On Halloween, you insisted on related costumes for us and the dog, he, Toto, you Dorothy, and me, the cowardly lion. We set the camera on the dining room table with self-timer, a makeshift tripod, and in the frantic 10 seconds of countdown, attempted to pose in front of the fireplace. At the end of the night, we sprawled out on the rug in the living room, unwrapping the remaining candy unpicked by trick or treaters, funneling the neglected pieces into each other’s mouths in competition, Almond Joys mostly, Junior Mints, an expedited stride towards cavities, our teeth, tongues, and the night itself, indefinitely sweet. 

For Thanksgiving you cooked, a full day’s preparation for a feast reserved just for the two of us. We gorged ourselves to capacity and passed out on the couch with our legs dangling off the side, pants unbuttoned, stomachs’ freed. You cooked for Christmas, too, but by then, a month had made another world. I watched as you trailed your fork in circles around your plate, picking up small bites to have sit in your mouth until they could dissolve into a swallow. Your now dwindling appetite was a burdened knowing, placed between the two of us on our dining room table. You were always hungry. Some people ate to live, you lived to eat. You had never met a dessert you didn’t set out to conquer. But here you were, hacking away at the crust of the pecan pie slice before you like you were trying to reach a delicate truth in its center. Breaking the bites smaller, an attempt at resistance. Maybe it was you showing me you were trying the only way you knew how. Maybe it was you showing you.

Every room became a tundra. The thermostat was never high enough. The heat at its greatest setting, I’d be standing in the kitchen with my head in the freezer, you in another room, bundled somewhere beneath a building of blankets. I could hear your teeth clinking together in chatter from the opposite end of the apartment. Then you were too warm. You’d wake in the night a pool, feeling as though you’d been submerged sometime during sleep. Whatever hair you had left from the wrath of medication stood drenched, looked like it had been taken swimming. When the spasms would jerk your body up from rest in the night, like reflex, mine would follow. Go back to bed, please, you’d beg, and I’d protest sleep, resisting for a few minutes until I couldn’t keep my head up any longer. I’m right here if you need me, for anything, really, I’d say, before falling back into REM’s grip.

You had been a warning before you weren’t. Your pallor like porcelain, your eyes, a liquid rust. We both knew but knowing doesn’t make anything easier. Sometimes knowing feels like a secret you never asked to hear but are forced to listen to and keep anyway. Sometimes knowledge is a growing rash, its itch, a stubborn constancy whose spread is a slow but certain conquest. We knew and the knowing was an intruder wrestled with until it won.

I put off the grief in advance. It would come eventually and when it did, it would hit me with the force of a car traveling along an open Los Angeles freeway, a category five hurricane in my weekly mundane. I’d like to think that months later, almost eleven now, it’s something different, no longer grief but a consciousness of what has been lost, an always absence asking for acknowledgement. People as a vacancy have a tendency to remain just that. Someday I’ll probably meet someone else. Maybe she will remind me of you, or she won’t. Maybe she too will talk about astrology, the stars’ place and their purpose, how we exist at the same time because of them, without option for coincidence. Maybe she will be something entirely new and again, I’ll struggle to pinpoint exactly what it is that keeps me returning. I’ll likely sleep better next to her than alone, intimacy, insomnia’s always cure. She will occupy a place in my life, but somewhere other than where you lived for those four years, separate from what was yours, filling a different gap. I’ll keep a space for you. I’ll keep writing these letters, letters to a dead someone, in hopes that you, my dead someone, will someday reenter the home we made ours, stumble upon them sitting on their high shelf, pick them up with your small ghost hands, if ghosts are allowed hands, and read them. 

The last spring, before disease hijacked our relief, you stood on the porch picking fruit from our plants. You couldn’t believe the size of the kumquats, the full-bodied color of the berries. The smile didn’t move from your face that day. Later, we’d pull the remnants of strawberries, their skin and seeds from the spaces in between each other’s teeth, a bowl on the coffee table housing the pits of cherries we devoured, our tongues, the moment, indefinitely sweet.