Free falling
I dreamed the other night that I was buying tickets for a marching band and had left Tin in the car and three ladies abducted him and I was running as fast I could after him but not moving and woke screaming Tiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnn!
A friend, who spent half his life with his partner, is visiting us because he is on a friend hopping trip in the U.S. after his partner died of cancer last year. He said he remembers the moment when he almost died in his arms, in the middle of a seizure, his mind knowing his body was no longer serving him. But what comforts him was the smile on his lover’s face in the days leading up to his death.
On a stopover to see friends in New York, a friend of a friend made a phone call, “The raccoon’s back, I’m going to get the pepper spray.” The next phone call was the hospital, he was in a coma, having fallen out the window onto a rock. He died days later. His partner still trying to piece together the moments in between the phone calls.
Bastille Day looms in my near future, two years from the date my mother called and said, “I need to go to the emergency room.” This from a woman who refused to be taken to the hospital when 70% of her body was covered with bruises from falling. We were walking home from the Ponce de Leon festival, one too many margaritas in us, the moon glossy over the bayou, passing the Spanish Customs House when I got the call. I remember that moment as if I was standing still in time and I often, unfortunately, go back to it, knowing what I know now and wonder if it would not have been best to have just put her back in bed and let her die in peace.