I'm Not Unhappy

To Penny,

A remembrance, a prayer:

You like your toast charred. You only read books to smell the paper. You greet every dawn with a billowing fart. Every night you dream that you are drowning. Time scares you. You think a lot about trauma. And the way that colors play on a surface. And the beauty of a wildflower. Nothing brings you comfort like clenching a small rubber animal in your hands. Nothing calms you like a kiss to the forehead, a too-tight hug. You like to feel squeezed, small, constricted. You sleep under a weighted blanket.

I am not unhappy, just quiet.

You wish you were born in the '20s. I said, “What about the Great Depression?” and you shrugged. You went seven years without drinking, scared you’d become your mother. One day, you looked in the mirror and saw her anyway. You splashed some of my whiskey into your coffee after I had left for work. Added a heavier pour in your second cup. Sat on the piano bench, hands floating over the keys, imagining a symphony in your head. You cried until your nose was thick with snot. You fell asleep on the couch, slept through all your work calls that day. You awoke when I opened the door, stood and stretched, said, “I’ve always wanted to play the piano.” “Ok,” I said, taking in the sight of you, “I can teach you” and you burst into tears and walked away.

I was scared of having children, trembling at the memories of childhood. You were scared too, I think. But that night you reached for me in the dark, pulled me close, guided me into you. Coiled around me like a spring, begged in my ear for me to come in you, whiskey on your breath, eyes closed. Imagining what? I thought, losing myself in you. You rolled away and cried.

You told me that you wanted to grow old with me, but we couldn’t make it a decade.

I stopped being able to sleep, took to wandering the old graveyard at the Methodist church down the street. At first, I’d walk the rows, reading names and dates. It got to the point, though, when I couldn’t pass a headstone without crying. Death would never make sense to me.

I started using again. Just pills this time. You didn’t even know, or at least pretended not to. When you told me you were pregnant, I couldn’t even see straight. I remember the fear in your eyes, though. You looked into mine and saw nothing.

I’m not unhappy, just tired.

I once believed that I’d become a great man. “They usually only call a man great after he’s died,” you said. I remember how free I felt when I finally trusted myself on skis. I remember when I first saw my mother as human. I remember spells cast by roman candles. What would it have been like if I had gotten everything I wanted? I think. I look at you and you avoid my eyes. What will it feel like when it’s gone?

We take to sleeping in different rooms. You have to sleep on your side, diagonal across the bed. Says it settles him down. “Him?” I say and weep at the glory of such things. My hand forgets yours. Forever is a really long time. Maybe a decade’s not so bad, I think.

On our second date I gave you a book of Byron’s poems. You smiled even though you don’t like poetry. Put it on your nightstand even if you never read it. When you told me you wanted to name him Byron, I cried for three days straight. “You never used to cry,” you say. “Now you cry all the time.”

It’s not that I don’t like talking, it’s just that I don’t know how. I watched you slipping away and thought, if my words were lassos, if they were rope, if they could tether you, hold you here, bring you back, then I’d use them. I’d string them together, fashion some kind of rescue for us. But instead, I sat across the table as you swirled noodles on your fork, wordless as we cleaned our plates in the dim light of the restaurant.

You like sudoku. And crosswords. And puzzles. You bought a Roomba that didn’t work. “Why?” I asked, and you silently fixed it. Your temper grew with your belly. I had daydreams that you died in a car wreck, you and the baby, and then I’d be free. Then, so disgusted that I could think such things, I’d get high and walk to the cemetery.

When I asked you about your engagement ring you said that you had lost it down the sink drain. I’ve always been indecisive. You started taking the dog on longer and longer walks. When my manager asked how the pregnancy was going, I shrugged. “Easier for you than for her, I bet!” he said with a laugh.

We hadn’t had sex since that night you had talked about the piano. As you neared full term, your midwife prescribed it: “softens the cervix,” she said, “may help induce labor.” You text me on my lunch break, come home and make love to me. I lay you on the bed, kiss you all over your body, lingering on your breast and your stomach, but I can’t get hard. You look at me in disbelief before storming out of the room. I put my clothes back on and go back to work.

It's not you, I wish I’d said. You’re all I ever wanted.

You sang him Sam Cooke. You sang him Cat Stevens. You sang him Bill Withers. I wondered if he’d have my hair or my eyes or my nose. I wondered if he’d have my hunger for attention. I spoke to him by speaking to you. I spoke to you by speaking to him. I spoke and the air ate my words.

I got a call from your mom that you were in labor. “I’ll be right there,” I say, checking my soberness in the rearview mirror. “Don’t,” she says. “She’d like some space.”

I drove home, paced the floor. Sat on the bed, grabbed the Byron volume off your nightstand. Read the words: “Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.” Closed the book.

You like to sing in an opera voice. You like to identify mushrooms. You know trees by their leaves. You feel at home talking to old people. You said you wanted to grow old with me and we did, though we didn’t even crack thirty.

I’m not unhappy, just scared.

I never knew my father. My mother was a mystery to me. I knew you—or at least I did for a season. But neither you nor I are the people we were a decade ago.

I dialed your mom’s phone over thirty times that night. It went straight to voicemail. I sat at the piano, fingers dancing over keys by memory, played the sun into the sky. I drove to the hospital, but I was too out my head to find you. Spent hours riding an elevator up and down before driving back home.

You hate spaghetti but love lasagna. Your favorite color is mustard. You like to rewatch your favorite sitcoms over and over. You lived in your bathrobe. You were always rearranging the furniture. “Why aren’t you happy?” you asked me on our one-year anniversary.

A social worker called and asked pages of questions. I asked what it was for, she said it was just procedure. “Procedure for what?” I asked, and she moved on to the next question.

Your mom brought you home the next day. I looked eagerly from person to person. “Is he still in the car?” I asked. “Listen, Joop, we need to talk.” I sink to the floor expecting you to tell me he died then you say: “He’s ok, he’s ok. He’s with an interim family.” You see the question marks in my eyes, speak in a measured voice. “They’re going to look after him, just temporarily. Until…” and you stop, looking for words. “Until what?” I say before you breakdown into tears and talk about how we can’t raise this baby and you never wanted to be a mother and it’ll be better this way. “We can place him for adoption, Joop. Somebody that really needs a baby can raise him right. Better than we could. You really want to pass on our shit to a baby?” you say. I say that I can raise him and you laugh. “When’s the last time you were sober?” you say and your eyes are all daggers.

Your mom stays at our house while you recover. You ask me to sleep at a hotel for a few nights. I spend hours watching tv. I think about my mother raising me by herself, think about how we spent our lives as two deer running from wolves. If I could spare a child that, shouldn’t I?

You like your coffee well creamed and filled to the brim. Your left leg is shorter than the right. You have a mole on the back of your thigh that I wonder if you have ever seen. You used to snore and I wonder if you still do. Our mattress has two craters in the shapes of our bodies, though the memory foam is probably forgetting me by now.

Birthdays have always made me sad. Isn’t an anniversary like a birthday? “Why aren’t you happy?” you had asked me and in your eyes I saw something tremble. “I’m not unhappy, just…” and I never could finish the sentence.

I’ve always been scared of storms. I’ve always been scared of being a coward. I always felt as if I were letting you down. I always was letting you down. The first time I saw him convinced me of the realness of God. I couldn’t see myself in him. I saw you, though—the eyes, the nose, the one dimple. But of course, I saw you everywhere. “You’re my hallelujah,” I whispered to his eyes the only time I held him, “you’re my burning bush.”

You were brought to tears by the thinness of butterfly wings. You struggled to keep plants alive. You had a heightened sense of smell. You hated shower curtains. You loved and hated being alone. You were scared of the dark, but also felt safe in it: like a seed, like a star.

I signed the papers and felt nothing. Thought a lot about the sins of fathers visited upon the sons, the ends and beginnings of worlds. Why am I here just to wish I wasn’t? I think and accidentally drive to the house we used to live in together. Strange how ink can make me not a husband, not a father.

When I was young, I’d put rocks in my pockets to feel more substantial. I spent twelve years chasing your laugh. Every time I picked you up, I was amazed at your lightness. I feel like we were a rough draft, a brainstorm, a love story written in pencil. Tomorrow is the most beautiful word in any language. Nothing is more slippery than hope.

It takes twelve years for Jupiter to circle the sun. We almost made it ten. A decade is a long time, but if we measured our love in Jovian years, we’d just be sharing our first Christmas. You remember that season when you judged our sin by the weight of single-use plastics we consumed? Or the one when I measured everything in kilometers just in case I got the gig at Oxford? Or the nearly five hundred phases of the moon we shared together, each new moon a dark secret? Maybe cycle is just as beautiful of a word as tomorrow—in the end, don’t they mean the same thing? Even a dying star is food for the universe. Maybe love is something that can be composted; maybe it can fertilize the growth of something new. The last thing you said to me was “it’s going to be ok,” but all I heard was goodbye. Don’t worry, I’m done trying to save things. But you never even tried, you’d probably say. We’re probably both lying, at least a little bit. But know this: this thing mattered to me—it’s living and it’s dying—more than all the atoms in the universe. “You’re always trying to quantify things,” you told me once and as I think about it all now, I smile at all the weight of happiness you heaped upon my shoulders, heavier indeed than the weight of all things as the poet would say. 

With love,

J.