I heard it screaming out your name : Day Eight

Day 08 – A moment

When I wrote in my private (well, more private) journal, doing the 30 days, on day 8 I wrote about something funny Aiden had said to me in the car that day. Something vaguely hilarious, and totally showed the inner workings of a child's brain and his heart. He didn't say anything too terribly funny today. He still isn't feeling completely better and more than anything gave me attitude most of the day.

The only thing I can think to write about was the night, two weeks ago, when B walked into my apartment not carrying his overnight bag, and how I knew right then that it was over. I didn't even have to ask him, though I did, because some part of me needed to hear it out loud. However, that's much too new and I have had far less time to stew over it, over-analyze it, and come up with the perfect words for it. So, I have decided to share another older writing of mine (back when I was far more cynical, and seemed to have a handle on my poetic side, much more than I do now... being a mother sucks that out of you.) I'm not sure if it's something that actually happened, or something I just thought up in my head, and it sounded so pretty that I had to write it down. Needless to say, this is my moment, real or imagined...

--

He sleeps lightly, and she knows this. His breathing is as soft and even as her own as he lays on their bed with his back to her, his shoulders and hips raising the covers up into twin mountains between them. She runs her fingers softly over his bare side, feeling all of his fuzz and fury with a single touch, and she can still smell his scent etched into her pillow case, stained into the stuffing of her pillow. She lay her cheek onto it, and whispers softly, "I love you" not sure if he would hear it as a dream, or not at all.

Her legs ached from work and lack of sleep, and nothing more than a good night's rest would cure all of the things she listed off on her fingers and toes that ached about her. Her hands, her back, her mind. Nothing seemed as it should be.

It was barely dark enough to be called so, yet here they both were, stripped down and under the covers as if it were later than usual. The crickets weren't yet strumming their lullabies. A short cigarette out on the patio and she would be ready for another day, another hour, another lost moment with this man.

"There is nothing particularly special about either one of us," she thought to herself, "but maybe that's why I continue to pretend that he means so much." Not that she would ever tell him any differently. He doesn't deserve to hear such things, just as she isn't a woman who deserves to think them. "Nothing is ever right, and there isn't a single thing anyone of us is able to do about that." Change, the only constant the world has ever known.

She crawls back in between the mountain and falls asleep easily with the smell of lilac in her hair, and the promise that things will be different, in some other place that she'll never even have the joy of seeing or knowing.

The grass is so much greener when you're not the one behind the mower.