Prompt #4

Then you had to bring up reincarnation over a couple of beers the other night.

And now I’m serving time for mistakes made by another in another lifetime.

                                                            -“Galileo” by the Indigo Girls

I think back to just last weekend, when my sister asked, “Man, can you even imagine having to go back and do it again? Be a teenager again?! Have to grow up again??”

“No thanks!”

We laughed, but a childish terror peeked out from behind our laughing words. To do it again….

x             x             x

The tears I couldn’t stop while my sister, all worry and regret, stroked my hair. “I shouldn’t have told you. But I was so mad, and I wanted to make sure you knew, so he won’t be able to do it to you again.”

“Did he…really…say it? …Really?” Sobs broke my words.

“’Told you I could get any girl to think I liked her. Any girl.  I win.’ Just like that. And I could have slapped him. I should have.” And her voice was full of sorrow.

And I thought I would never stop crying.

x             x             x

A weary night. I knelt in meditation, listening and not listening to the answer to my heavy petition.

I took a deep breath and said to the heavens, “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m just too tired.”

And I knew it was wrong, but I was so tired. So heavy.

And I fell asleep to heaviness and dreamed of the friend I would let down, of her future that would fork and digress and never be so peaceful again. Because I was too tired and heavy to bear her peace and mine. And I awoke unyielding and full of shame.

x             x             x

A startling hammer in my chest, sitting next to him. A pounding that was new, that had never been there before, in all of our hours of talking and sewing and driving and movies. A pounding that increased as I listened to the words behind his words.

“So you’re leaving for sure? And you know I’m leaving? That I won’t be here—here—in a year and a half? I’ll be on the east coast. I guess I just thought, I don’t know… Well, I guess I’ll be watching the foreign films alone from now on.”

And his look—a look that was uncertain of itself, of what even he wanted. A look that was half a goodbye, half an invitation. And I saw another road wind through the look—a road without my Chad and my Coren and my Risa and my Haakon, my fairy children as yet unknown to me. And I was afraid of a road without Chad, afraid to admit that this other road could be just as beautiful, that either road was a good choice. A beautiful choice.

And I opened the jeep door. Because I could not face the choice.

x             x             x

An egg, half dyed blue, trembling on the spoon in my hand. I saw her—ashen skin, mouth slightly open—and I didn’t see her. She wasn’t there anymore.

But a body was. And my dad, holding the hand on that body, stroking it, kissing it, weeping saltwater rivers. Brothers and sisters everywhere in the room—literally everywhere—the vast numbers of us, first watching, then understanding, then ducking heads into shoulders, into pillows, into hands.

And I felt it—the heave from the swell of the wave, the rush forward, the break, the break, the break… Oh, a break that wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t ever, ever stop! One wave and another and another, so fast upon each other that there was not even time for breathing. Just the waves, just the saltwater. And in the blur of my vision a father holding a hand on a body. Just a body. But no mother anymore.

x             x             x

And the mark of the handprint on his face. That angry red that I see every time I close my eyes. And I think, That handprint alone sentences me back to a mosquito’s life for a thousand days. A thousand lifetimes as a bloodsucking pest, to be cursed and hated and crushed endlessly. That one hand print. A thousand lifetimes to pay.

x             x             x

 “No,” I whisper. Then “NO,” loud and firm this time, so that Shiva hears me, wherever he lies with Parvati in the cosmos, in their endless practice of the kama sutra. So that he hears the finality in my voice. So that he knows that when I am laid to rest full five fathoms down, I will not answer the call of the universe.

Not again.

I will yawn and stretch, look up at him and tsk-tsk, “Now, my cosmic dancer, you know better. So if you please.”

And I will turn and curl back into my own immortal beloved, close my eyes, and sleep.