I Feel Us Drowning In A Sea Spilled From A Cup

I wish I could capture for you how beautiful the mid-autumn sunrise is in the Big Woods. We watched it from the creaking, rocking planks of a mid-sized boat this morning. The clouds that lie along the horizon light up first, just a low gray light that the call the false dawn. It comes on sometimes an hour or more before the first real light; it was already glowing vaguely in the direction of Buffalo when we climbed aboard and set off, bright enough to see shapes and contrasts in the gloom. Then the clouds higher up started to blush a sort of salmon pink color, and HB and I went to lie on our stomachs on either side of the bow to watch. The waves were picking up, and the boat wasn't really that big, so the fiberglass overdeck bucked and rocked with each passing swell. It made me feel a little sick, to tell you the truth, but after while HB pulled me over and we sat up, side by side, shoulders and thighs touching. I know you're probably sick of hearing about that detail, but we did pass a pipe back and forth and it really did help with the nausea. More than that, it seemed to pull away all the extraneous thoughts and distractions, leaving me only with the gathering pink fire on the horizon and the solid real warmth of my lover's body next to me. I laid my head on his shoulder and watched the faintest wash of blue creep up the sky behind the clouds, where the earlier pink tinting was now turning to feathery brushstrokes of the purest gold. I sat there listening to the wind and the water and the creak and bump of the boat, and I thought: I shouldn't have to be sick to do things like this, I shouldn't have to fear the future in order to know what's good today. If only I had known...

"Bigg," HB softly said to me.

"Yeah."

"You want to know something?" When I didn't answer, he went on. "I read every word you write."

At first it didn't sink in. I thought he was just complimenting me in that intense, personally focused way that he has. My head was full of the dawn blooming out there where the water meets the sky, in a place you can see but never reach. But then he didn't say anything, he just looked at me, and it started to come to me. What I wrote here last time, at the end of the post. I realized I had been thinking about it so long (or at least it seemed that way) that the silence had changed, tensed.

"You do, do you?" That's me, the great wit. "Anything in particular that moved you?"

"You could say that." His fingers were curling and uncurling restlessly. "What you wrote yesterday. In your blog." He reached up and plucked at the flap on his jacket pocket.

"Don't smoke a cigarette," I commanded, and he dropped his hand with a guilty look. Damn him, now I wanted one too. I reached over and patted the hand he'd dropped in his lap and said, "Sorry."

"It's okay. I shouldn't have one."

"You always want one when we argue," I observed mildly. "S'okay. I do too. So, are you mad that I wrote about David? Or about you falling down?"

He laughed then, and I liked that. "No, when I looked up and saw your face I knew you already had it all written up in your head." He laughed and nodded, his hair flying in the breeze that had picked up. His face quickly sobered, though, and he reached in his pocket. I thought he was getting his cigarettes anyway, but it was his fancy new phone. He flicked it open. "I want to show you something," he said gravely. "Push that button there." It had an italicized i on it.

I took the phone and pushed the button. It's a crazy little invention, his phone: fold it one way and there's a screen half the size of my palm, fold it another way and it's a keyboard, or you can just leave it folded up and still answer it like a phone. Holding it always makes me think of the great big black bakelite rotary dial monster we had at home until I was fifteen or so, with its party line and five digit phone number. The screen was open to me, and it lit up with an hourglass... and then my blog surfaced in perfect white text against the dark gray. Even the damn pictures were there.

"It chimes and comes up every time you post something," he told me, and didn't I feel stupid then? I like to think I kept up, but right then I'll tell you I felt like a caveman peering out from under his brow ridges. "So." he said, nicely summing up the situation in one word. "What's the bad news, and when were you going to tell me?"

I automatically look back over my shoulder at Brad, stolidly fishing off the stern.

"He can't hear you," HB said. "Tell me."

So what do I do? I shrugged. "HB, it's not really news. I have cancer. It grows. It's in the nature of things to progress."

"Worse than it was a month ago?"

"It's there," I said.

"But you've still got options! The surgery, that clinical trial with the phototherapy you were looking at-"
I took both his hands and held them. I didn't want to say it, but he was making me. "Honey, options are for people with money. I don't know when the disability money will come, or even if it will come at all for sure yet. If it takes too long, they could put me in jail again." My throat was starting to feel all thick, and I could feel that pricking at the back of my eyelids. Damn him, he wasn't gonna make me cry. "Look, I can only do what I can do. You've already done all you can in the money department. Now, it's just sort of time to sit back and see what happens."

"You can't!" he shouted at me, and then Brad did look at us, startled. I waved at him, mouthed it's okay and turned back to HB. "You can't just wait," he hissed furiously. "You just can't. I won't let you."

I felt totally helpless. "What's gonna happen is gonna happen, honey." I gripped his hands tightly between mine.

"That's why you brought me out here," he said, and I could tell that he was angry and resentful. Who could blame him. "Not to celebrate the good news. Not even to tell me the bad news. Just so we could do this before..."

"Hey, hey, it's not like that," and I pulled his face against my shoulder. He held me, and I held him, and I tried my best to reassure him. "I'm trying. I'm still fighting, even if I gotta do it lying down. I'm stronger than I was, and that's down to you. Long as I have you, I guess I can't be anything but okay, right? Promise."

"I don't want any more promises like that from you," he told me bitterly, but he didn't stop holding me. He held me while I watched the sun start to come up over his shoulder, and even while Brad finally started the motor and took us back to the dock. It was almost time for the boat rental place to open, and the owner would want this back. He didn't let go of me until it was time to step back onto dry land.

You know, I used to think I knew what I was doing with this blog, and what I'm doing with it now isn't what I had in mind then. I wrote this post for you, 'Hookup Boy,' the internet trick who gave me his ring on my own home ground and has saved my life again and again. I wrote it for you, and for my kids when they're old enough to understand, so that maybe they'll know a little more of who and how and why I was who I am to at least a little better extent. I don't want them to have the lingering questions that Jen has. I want you, and them, to look back to this morning, when I sat on the deck of a little boat in the waters of a very big lake and watched the sun come up. Maybe someday you can share it with them, the way I wanted us all to share this morning and what it meant to me. Maybe not; that'll be up to you, I guess.

Ah, hell. I don't know why I do this anymore, because lately it hurts when I honestly examine what's happening to me. Maybe I should quit.

Title lyric from "Calling All Angels" by Train.