The Weight

Crossroads No. 9

That first night he invited me to stay. It took everything I had in me to drive away.

We spent the next several weeks in the fall. In midlife, once you’ve become a mother, been someone else’s wife, life is chockablock with limits. And love has to be stolen in the night—sometimes quietly, other times with a battle cry.

We took to porch-sitting, sipping sweet tea, late nights, his hands on me and four-hour phone calls in the space between. Early mornings made for long days, his calloused fingers working rusted steel, his mind on me.

Living for every other weekend spent making out like we weren’t on the wrong side of forty. Making up for lost time before we knew damn well what we’d been missing.

The lifetime of longing won’t let us live in the vast divide between here and when he can next get his hands on me.

Why is that destiny so often feels something akin to damnation? What’s the difference anyway? I’ve been around long enough to know that ecstasy and agony are two halves of the same whole. We fell in deep. They say we only ever see one side of the moon. And as the world turns, we mostly only show what we want to.

Here we were in the second half of life and I had half a mind to put it all out there before he went and put me on a pedestal. From where I sat, I didn’t have much left to lose.

I know how it feels to fall from someone else’s heaven, and I know the road back from that particular kind of hell.

I sit talking endlessly. He is quiet, studying me. His eyes, stripped of youth’s blind optimism, carry instead the worn luster of a life lived long before me. Like brown, stone storehouses stacked with untold tales and unpaid tolls from a past I would never see.

I hid him away like my best-kept secret, like some hometown watering hole only you and your next of kin know. Night after night, we swapped stories and compared scars. There beneath the moon with our backs against the painted brick, my legs draped over his, he brought his pockets full of fears, and listened as I handed over the heartbreak I carried with a death grip in clutched hands, told him how I’d felt so heavy in another’s arms. He sat with me here, held my heavy heart, kissed my tears and whispered with a deep, honeyed thrum, “You are weightless.”

"With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together, and then the bottom fell out.
Where water does not collect, the moon does not dwell."
Chiyono