Wearing His Socks

5 years ago yesterday I was sitting in a hospital room holding his hand. He was hanging in a type of suspended animation surrounded by whirring and humming machines whose job it was to keep him alive for another few hours.

5 years ago I couldn't imagine not feeling as if I had been hit in my solar plexus with a baseball bat, I thought that feeling would last forever but it didn't. Today, I am just wistful.

I'm going to sleep tonight wearing his thick woolen socks. I gave away the clothes he kept at my house years ago but I kept the socks. (What can I say, my toes get chilly).

I'll leave you with something I wrote here 5 years ago.

And soon it will be my birthday, and then his birthday, and then Fall and Christmas and he will be dead a year and then a decade and then one day I'll be gone and our most intimate shared memories will go with me.

There are times I feel like a shattered tumbler but I'm not. I'm a chipped glass and time will sand down that jagged edge on the rim and one day I will be filled again to the brim with trust, love and affection to be drunk and I'll drink from vessel of the man I love in return.

I don't have any pithy, clever way to end this except to use Samuel Beckett's words from The Unnamable,

"[I]t will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on,

I'll go on."

I did, dear reader, and I am, and I will.