This City

She Opens Her Eyes

1.)
She opens her eyes for the first time in a long time. I smile at her and she tries to smile back but it looks like she’s grimacing in pain so she shuts her eyes again.

2.)
The water runs down the drain. I stare, captivated by the swirling liquid, waiting for it to get hot. I stand there for fifteen minutes before I catch myself.

3.)
The knife slices through the chicken breast slowly and gracefully - it doesn’t so much tear the meat as it separates it, divides it, splits it apart, decimates it in the classical sense. The knife is expensive and elegant and it reminds me of her in a way, but not for either of those reasons.

4.)
The broth boils, the chicken cooks. She doesn’t like noodles in her soup, or vegetables either, just the broth and chicken, which always seemed like a really boring meal to me but whatever.

5.)
She’s asleep now. Even when she’s sick, she’s beautiful.

6.)
She coughs. I hold my breath and wait for the fit, the minutes and minutes of horrible, choking coughs and then the harsh, stilted, scared breathing as she cries into my chest, waiting for her lungs to catch up with the rest of her body. It doesn’t come. She coughs again, lightly, looks at me, smiles (not grimaces). She is right again - not back to perfect, not yet, but right again at least. The cold is leaving her body.

I smile back and then double over, choking on air, struggling to breathe, struggling for my livelihood, afraid that I’ll die even though I know I won’t. She won’t let me.

Later she apologizes over and over again, but it was only a matter of time until I caught it and we both knew it and besides there’s nothing we can do about it now and I promise it’s okay and that I love you forever and ever babe I swear.

7.)
Water dripping down my throat. Where am I? Hazy memories of fitful sleep. I am wrong inside - there is something in my body, a virus that has invaded me, and it is wrong wrong wrong. I feel the sheets beneath me, the pillow under my head, and I realize that somehow we’ve switched places. She traces something on my hand - our symbol, I think - and smiles at me and I fall asleep trying to smile back.

8.)
I wake up to music. I focus on it, trying to remember this song, these lyrics. It’s the soundtrack of the movie we saw on our first date. I’m looking around for her and she’s not there and I don’t know where she could be - somewhere in the house, I’m sure, but she’s not with me, she’s not holding my hand, and I’m scared to death for some reason that maybe the sickness resurfaced and she collapsed in the kitchen, I’m scared that maybe she’s coughing and crying and trying to crawl back to me and now we’re both sick and now there’s no one to help us and we’ll both die together in our apartment and no one will ever know. I stare at the door trying to will her back in, hoping she can hear my thoughts and hoping she’ll come back to me soon.

9.)
I breathe in. The music is still playing. She’s back. I breathe out.