The English Phantom
I don't know much about him really. So little, actually, that most times it's more convincing to my heart and mind to assume he was a ghost I created in my phantom land. All I know to be true of him is that when he spoke, it was almost always with a sly smile that made the wrinkles extending from the outer corners of his eyes come out and stretch their arms. His english accent laid on so thick that you could touch it as it permeated the burnt Arizona air. People were drawn to him. Every day a new stranger would stop by the Cabana and engage in endless conversations with him. He was a man every one proudly called their friend.
It was his smile that touched me first. It would spread itself across his face, through the smoke of his always lit cigarette, and plant itself across my own face. It was something unavoidable. To smile back at him was an urge as strong as the force of strings attached to either corner of my mouth and he, the puppeteer, gently pulling upwards on each of them.
He was my friend. I spent most of my sumer by his side on our little Cabana oasis planted amongst a sea of black asphalt and the standard 100 degree plus weather. He filled my loneliness and sadness I felt from moving back to the desert after a failed attempt of living out East on my own. My heart was bruised, sore, and broken. He nursed it back to life. We would lie on the leather couch in the heaven of the air conditioning, and smell of coffee beans, and just hold each other. We alternated between rubbing each others stocking feet and reading out loud the latest book I was reading. He was healing me without knowing.
I loved him as a friend, as one I felt I could trust with anything, including my sutured heart. I could have never known, nor prepared myself of the discovery to come a month later that he was the man my son would know as his father.
Mid-summer he had to return back to the foreign english country that loaned him to us all for the past year. I bit my tears with the pain of biting a bullet when the day arrived for his departure. We hugged goodbye as the angry sun looked over us. It would be the last time I ever felt his salt and pepper hair between my fingers, and the heat of his body embraced securely with my own. Our son was only a week in the making that day, and this was the closest he'd ever come to his father.
I found out about my little boy almost a month to the date that he moved away. I let him know immediately, and he sounded genuinely excited at the news of having a son after being told his whole life by fertility specialists that he would never be able to father a child. I wanted to believe him when he said he would take care of us, that he loved us both, and would be here before our baby took his first breath... so I did.
Over the course of my pregnancy his weekly calls turned into bi-weekly, than monthly, until there were none. Excuses for the absence of his voice and body were soon to be the only thing that filled the space between us. And yet I still held on to him. I still missed him. Still held him so highly in my mind with the benefit of the doubt that he'd come through somehow. Each day the reality of the situation ripped away my belief in him like the blanket from the clutched hand of a child until there was only a thread remaining from my security blanket of belief.
Sometimes we ingrain beliefs in our minds to give us the courage to prevail through otherwise unbearable times. We all do it every day to some degree. Ask anyone you pass by what they believe in, and though they may have to pause to ponder the question, I'm sure they will all be able to produce a decent list of their own personal, religious, scientific, or cultural beliefs. It's what makes us human, the choice of what/who to believe.
My belief in this english phantom was in vain, but it helped me be relatively healthy through this pregnancy, and carry a seemingly healthy baby boy, that otherwise, I don't know I would have had the strength to endure. I run my hand over my swollen, stretched out, aching belly, and whisper heart-filled I love yous to my unborn son. Every time I say those three words to him I'm embedding with them a silent promise to always be here for him to believe in for love, shelter, comfort, and strength... beliefs that every child should have in their mother.
It was his smile that touched me first. It would spread itself across his face, through the smoke of his always lit cigarette, and plant itself across my own face. It was something unavoidable. To smile back at him was an urge as strong as the force of strings attached to either corner of my mouth and he, the puppeteer, gently pulling upwards on each of them.
He was my friend. I spent most of my sumer by his side on our little Cabana oasis planted amongst a sea of black asphalt and the standard 100 degree plus weather. He filled my loneliness and sadness I felt from moving back to the desert after a failed attempt of living out East on my own. My heart was bruised, sore, and broken. He nursed it back to life. We would lie on the leather couch in the heaven of the air conditioning, and smell of coffee beans, and just hold each other. We alternated between rubbing each others stocking feet and reading out loud the latest book I was reading. He was healing me without knowing.
I loved him as a friend, as one I felt I could trust with anything, including my sutured heart. I could have never known, nor prepared myself of the discovery to come a month later that he was the man my son would know as his father.
Mid-summer he had to return back to the foreign english country that loaned him to us all for the past year. I bit my tears with the pain of biting a bullet when the day arrived for his departure. We hugged goodbye as the angry sun looked over us. It would be the last time I ever felt his salt and pepper hair between my fingers, and the heat of his body embraced securely with my own. Our son was only a week in the making that day, and this was the closest he'd ever come to his father.
I found out about my little boy almost a month to the date that he moved away. I let him know immediately, and he sounded genuinely excited at the news of having a son after being told his whole life by fertility specialists that he would never be able to father a child. I wanted to believe him when he said he would take care of us, that he loved us both, and would be here before our baby took his first breath... so I did.
Over the course of my pregnancy his weekly calls turned into bi-weekly, than monthly, until there were none. Excuses for the absence of his voice and body were soon to be the only thing that filled the space between us. And yet I still held on to him. I still missed him. Still held him so highly in my mind with the benefit of the doubt that he'd come through somehow. Each day the reality of the situation ripped away my belief in him like the blanket from the clutched hand of a child until there was only a thread remaining from my security blanket of belief.
Sometimes we ingrain beliefs in our minds to give us the courage to prevail through otherwise unbearable times. We all do it every day to some degree. Ask anyone you pass by what they believe in, and though they may have to pause to ponder the question, I'm sure they will all be able to produce a decent list of their own personal, religious, scientific, or cultural beliefs. It's what makes us human, the choice of what/who to believe.
My belief in this english phantom was in vain, but it helped me be relatively healthy through this pregnancy, and carry a seemingly healthy baby boy, that otherwise, I don't know I would have had the strength to endure. I run my hand over my swollen, stretched out, aching belly, and whisper heart-filled I love yous to my unborn son. Every time I say those three words to him I'm embedding with them a silent promise to always be here for him to believe in for love, shelter, comfort, and strength... beliefs that every child should have in their mother.