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I Stopped. I Dropped. I Rolled.
I Stopped. I Dropped. I Rolled.
I stopped….
He walked back into the house minutes after walking out, and, while reaching for the phone, announced that he had just quit his job. And don’t get me/him wrong, it was an impossible situation and everyone was surprised that he had lasted that long. But I kept it to myself, the thoughts that he had quit because that day was his son’s sixth birthday. I didn’t want the world, or him, to know that I knew that much of what made him tick.
I dropped….
He walked into the house, dressed in his ACUs, and busied himself with questions as to how our day had gone. I knew something was wrong. I seemed to feel myself mentally bending forward at the waist as if ducking out of the way. But I didn’t ask; I kept myself busy by answering his questions and not asking mine.
After an hour or so he came off it.
“This is my last drill,” he said flat toned. “I’m medically discharged from the Army.” He threw it at me. A verbal hand grenade. And I didn’t know if he was holding the pin.
I asked a couple of questions of my own, starting off with my standard, “And how do you feel about that?”
I wasn’t told much. Only that after 13 years and 10 months he was no longer a soldier and didn’t know how to feel about that. This coming from the man who just weeks before told me a story of how he caught himself smiling while cleaning a gun; he hadn’t realized how badly he had missed the Army.
I rolled….
The phone rang and mom said that the caller I.D. read “British Columbia.” I knew who it was immediately and had to tell her twice to answer the phone. He was calling to tell me that I would be receiving a monthly check for his daughter. The call was a forewarning, he said, so I wouldn’t freak out when I received a package from the Canadian government.
I took the phone outside with me because I couldn’t stand the stares coming from my mom and C. I stood outside in the cold, listening to his voice. And then I tried in one hundred words or less to describe his daughter to him, the girl that he hasn’t seen since my mad 14 ½ hour trip almost five years ago. I heard myself saying things like, “She’s a brainiac. Most everyone adores her. She chews her fingernails like you. She draws like you. She sings like me. She looks like (your other daughter).”
And yet I remember thinking as these words were rolling off my tongue, “This is fucked up. ’What’s she like?’ How the hell do I tell you what she’s like?!? She has a giggle that makes the ugliest of moments cease to be. She has a voice and a vocabulary that seem to have mistakenly been put into the body of a four year old. She can make me so happy one moment and then push every one of my buttons the next. She brings love and light to most everyone she encounters. She glows most times.”
I even went so far as to ask her if she would like to speak to her father, him from Canada, on the phone. And I didn’t cry or get all shriveled up inside when she said, “Sure, mom.” It was later as I lied awake that I did those things when I realized that it was the first time she had ever knowingly heard his voice.
And when he told me that he feels real bad about not doing anything to help me out with her until now, I had the words “I forgive you” right on the tip on my tongue. But I made the mistake of looking up and meeting my mother’s eyes and swallowed them down so fast they choked me.
“I forgive you.” I tried to send that message to him as I tossed and turned in bed, but it has been years, almost five to be exact, since I’ve attempted to send anything to him, so I don’t know if he got it or not. And then I caught myself thinking about all the good there was in us while we existed. And I caught myself missing us. And I didn’t know what to do when I realized that what I wanted more than anything at that moment was to pick up the phone and have one of our old four hour phone conversations of yesterdays.
So I spent the night grieving. Sitting on the couch in the near dark, talking aloud to the him that ceased to exist so many years ago. Wanting. Yearning.
Da Man wasn’t home. The girls were sleeping. And I ached for something familiar. I wanted something that didn’t fucking hurt. Just for one tiny fucking minute I didn’t want to be surrounded by anything that fucking hurt.
I wanted to slide down a rainbow and land in a field of daisies. I wanted to lie beneath those magical trees, make out like teenagers, and swim in that river one more time.
But, instead, I simply rolled.
The rolling stone gathers no moss.
Or so they say.
posted on Nov 10, 2008 8:38 PM ()
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