087/100 aka 227/365

FLASH
Word Count: 460

After two days I’ve learned what the numbers are for. I watch the digital figures light up, flash, go up and go down. I know what is good and what isn’t. Right now, the numbers are all right, each within its plus/minus degree allowed to be labeled “all right.”

He looks even darker against the hospital white. He loves the sun and it paints him bronze, like a god. My god. My own dearly loved broken-right-now god.

A flash of a moment, a flash of a light changing color. A foot too quick on the pedal. Another’s too slow on the brake. A dance of two strangers without choreography, an impromptu ballet that ends in a crescendoed crash of steel and glass splinters. Splintered glass and shattered bone. Just that flash of a moment, and a body is made of a man.

I can’t think of him laying there on the road. Can’t without near losing my mind. He’s barely visible here in the bed. A flash of forehead and eyes. His hands.

It goes on like this day after day. Good days follow bad then swing back. Hope is doled out in IV drips to my worried questions. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. I’m learning new terminology for parts of him I’ve touched with sensually explorative fingers. I’ve learned how his organs are working, parts of him I’ve never considered except for his heart and I’ve never been concerned about what volume of blood it’s been pumping through its chambers. How much oxygen his lungs bring to the flow. Now it’s what I check out first thing in the morning, when I should be pouring him coffee and buttering toast.

~

I don’t believe that one can truly understand death without that intimate experience of the moment. Holding your breath and watching a chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and not rise again. Listening, because your eyes are lying. Holding a hand that gradually grows cold and colder. And even when you’ve seen that instant of transition, that moment when your world has changed and loss hollows out your being, you wonder how you missed it. How it all became the past in just a final breath.

I walk outside on legs of fragile reeds. Feet that somehow find their way back into the night. I turn around and look up at the lighted windows and feel as a deserter. As if I cannot leave him there and yet there’s no more I can do with wish or prayer and my fingers twitch with memory at that cold touch of his hand. I turn back towards the reality of parking lots and cars. The sky is black and empty. As am I.