The One Word Challenge, Part Three: "Intimacy"

Jan 15, 2011 09:17

Three parts into this project/meme and with many more to come. I have a backlog of words now, which is incredible. So thank you very much to all who have taken part in the 'giving' part of this and those who have been willing to receive a word as well. I look forward to reading some friends' posts/entries with their respective word.

If you're new to this challenge, here is how it goes:

1. Give me a word via comment. Any word. I will then take that word and write something based on that word.

2. If you'd like, ask for a word, either by comment or by doing a general call-out post of your own.

For those who really like to write and sometimes need a nudge or some inspiration I cannot begin to tell you how awesome this process has been!

Today's entry, brought to you by my friend civygirl is on the word "Intimacy". This following is what I came up.

Altering Gravity

Chris didn't really call it intimacy. In fact, he didn't even really have a name for it at all and let her name it instead.

"Pillow talk," she said. "It's about being intimate, ya know? It's this moment right now where I'm not wondering when you'll leave because I know you're staying. It's being able to lie here naked with you and talk until we're both so tired that one of us dozes off mid-sentence."

She was an English major and he really liked her way with words and especially the way she could bail him out like that, applying a description to the moment where he couldn't come up with anything on his own.

Pillow Talk, as it was, was something new. And she was right. He didn't want to leave. Not in the before, definitely not in the during, and not in the after.

That feeling, as it turned out, did not fade.

--

"This is exciting, isn't it?" he asked, as he packed his CDs and some old cassettes into a cardboard box. The box was one of many they'd been given by some friends who had also recently moved.

The excitement, he knew, had mostly been his and for good reason. The job in Portland was his for the taking and he took it, and she knew it was the right decision and the best thing but even as they packed and later loaded up the U-Haul she was scared to death.

They didn't know a soul up there. Her closest family up there would be an aunt in Beaverton that she barely spoke with. Her two best friends would be hours away.

When the truck was loaded he volunteered to drive it. She would drive their sole car, the same Honda she'd had since even before college. He said with the new job they'd add a second car and that, she thought, was something to be excited about. But it didn't help as much as she wanted it to.

She stood with the car door open and he walked over to her. She fought back crying but the thing about Chris was that he had a knack for knowing when she was about to cry. He didn't need to see tears at all. And he was good at making sure they never came.

"Hey... it's going to be good, I promise," he said. "We're going to do great. I know this is 'my' thing and I love you for being with me on this. And I'm going to make it up to you."

"You don't owe me anything," she said. "This is just how it all works, right?"

"It works however we want it to work," he reminded her. "And we will make it work. I swear."

--

The panic came in the form of 7 lbs. and 20 inches. As he held the baby he thought to himself that perhaps the panic should have come long before that, but it really hadn't.

Fear should have been more prevalent, perhaps, when they were painting the room with one wall baby blue and acceentuated with painted puffy clouds, another a light green with trees painted from the floor to halfway up the wall, and another wall divided between a night sky and the other half dark except for stars and with a quarter moon. She was the artist. All he really did was hold the ladder when needed or bring back the precise list of items from Home Depot.

He should have been more scared when they were assembling the crib but instead he was laughing. They were listening to The Beatles as they tried to figure out the instructions.

"By the way," he said. "I am not going in for this Raffi or Barney stuff. I refuse to make bad taste a part of our child's development."

She laughed and told him they would not have to buy up the children's music section.

When they drove home from the hospital she looked so exhausted but she smiled as she caught him looking at her in the rear view. She wanted to sit in back next to the baby, explaining that being even just the distance from the back seat to the front seemed too far. He put up no arguments.

They listened to Rubber Soul at a lower volume then usual, excited to take Cassidy, their baby daughter, to her room at home. He wondered if his daughter could ever know how lucky she was to be transported from a nice but ultimately flavorless room at Kaiser to a crib amidst a replica of Winnie the Pooh's 100 Acre Wood.

--

They had not been back to the hospital since the day he was born. The doctor's office, yes, but not to an actual hospital room.

"We're keeping him overnight because of his age," they'd explained. "With children under 10 and concussions we want to be extra cautious."

She held on to his hand, knowing he was just as frightened as she was but he was really good at holding it together for her sake. It was something that sometimes annoyed her, particularly in moments when she really needed him to say what was on his mind, but in that instance she was glad he was quiet. He didn't really need to talk.

Ryan, their 8 year-old son, was released the next day. They drove home and when she insisted that 12 year-old Cassidy sit in the front passenger next to her father so that she could sit in the back with Ryan there were no objections. She could see Chris looking in the rear view at her and she smiled briefly before turning her attention back to Ryan.

--

When she died the only comfort he found was in knowing that the pain was over. There had been too much of it for far too long. All through the tests, all through the treatments, and there was never really any moment of comfort or some glimmer of hope. The prognosis never improved and the medications only got stronger. The hair went, her body seemed to shrink before his eyes, and the feeling of utter helplessness was like standing too far out in the ocean with undertow and incoming waves slowing rising and pulling them under.

There was nothing left to shout at because he'd already tried shouting at everything. The unfairness, the cruelness that came with the disease, and the point where optimism gives way to hard truth and where "comfort" becomes the new word and recovery is not even mentioned. He'd cursed God, cursed doctors, cursed himself for having never thought of being a doctor. He cursed Fate and the Universe and all the other forces she had come to believe were so powerful over the course of their years together.

He thought of closeness and the strange sensation that had come with a rush of emotions so foreign they were frightening. But once the fear had been overcome all that he wanted in the world was so much clearer.

There hadn't been a distinct moment but rather multitudes of them. One night he could look at her and think of the oddest thing like a cat. Another night he'd lay on the pillow next to her and think of an apartment or a house. He'd thought of tropical places with beaches and sun. He'd thought of New York in winter or a little baseball diamond in spring. He thought of a little boy first but in the back of his thoughts there was always a little girl.

The little girl was long gone. She was there but grown, sitting back inside the empty room with her brother. Cassidy was so much like her mother. She was so strong and there were times that his 21 year old daughter looked so eerily much like her mother that it was impossible for Chris to not once more think back to the bar and the dorm and the first few dates and the pillow talk and how it had all started.

He thought of how their coming together had, as she once described it, altered gravity.

"Everything is different now," she'd said one night.

She was right then and he knew that wherever she had gone she was right once more.

The gravity had shifted again below his feet.

Everything was going to be different.

-----

Thanks for reading the entry, as this one was pretty long. Please keep the words coming! As noted, I have backlog but I promise to get to all of them.

J

loss, writing, one word challenge, life, meme, love

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