Life as a Shadow

I am curled up at the head of the bed between the pillows. It is my spot. He and she are off doing separate things, and I have the apartment to myself. I can stretch myself from one end of the bedroom to the other, especially when the blinds are pulled to the very top and the Sun streams through the window. I can be anywhere, but I love her pillows.

I am Shadow, and I have lived here with her since the beginning. Since before there was a him, there was her and me. Day and night, I find a way to exist for her. To hide. To think. To dance in the dark. To cry. She always leaves the light above the sink on, and the moon finds a way to sneak in at night. It’s never pitch dark. City streets. The occasional helicopter. I only need a little light to exist, and I can be here forever.

When he first moved in, he shut the blinds. He likes it dark, he says. He learned quickly that she wasn’t going to live in his dark. He bought a sleep-mask.

At night, she might be sound asleep while he tosses and turns, or maybe he is the one out and off to dreamland and she is twisting her body this way and that. Either way I put up with “them.” Sometimes he is inside of her, and she is inside of him. At other times she is sitting up with her legs crossed in front of her laptop. Files spread out around her. He stays away. He is on the couch with his phone and his sports.

I was there after her first heartbreak. That’s when I knew I had a home. There’s always light in her apartment even on her darkest days. She is afraid of the dark. No man or husband could cure her of that. Light was the cure, and with light I thrive. I don’t think she would be afraid of me, but I busy myself with her. I can read her thoughts. I know her face. The expressions. The posture of her body. The songs she plays. The quiet she aches for. It hurts to see her face when she is given no choice but to listen and listen.

I have seen them happy and miserable. She has cried alone next to me on this bed. And he has abused himself with food and liquor. I have suffered it all for her.

Moonlight. So perfect for me. I change to a silvery kind of black. Sometimes when she sleeps and the moon is just right, I spread myself out across her. She is beautiful. I like the way I curve with her. I reach down over her shoulder and in between her legs. She is very strong, and the muscles in her legs make such a perfect landscape for me. She often kicks her legs out from under the blankets. Her face is chocolate and soft but there is a purity to it. And when her eyes are closed and jumping this way and that, she reminds me of a volcano that’s been silent for too many years. Hot lava threatens from deep inside.

I only touch him rarely and often by accident. He makes me angry. He is selfish. He looks at himself in the mirror. I know that his time on the phone is time spent betraying her. It makes me angry that I can't stop him, but she seems to want nothing to do with him anyway. I've never seen her happier than when he is inside of her, but when it's done she seems done. Done with him. Done with their love. Just done.

I speak to the dust in the air and we both agree that this couple is poison. The atmosphere of their home is poison. And when they are together they fake conversations. The dust says he can see their words just tumbling to the floor. I nod.

Last night she was on the phone with her mother. Her mother is just like him. She talks and talks and makes her points and never lets her daughter say a word. I have very good hearing, but her mother is so predictable. I know what she’s preaching. I am sure the dust would be able to see her words sink, too. I can feel the weight of those words, and the toil it takes on her to listen to sentence after sentence…paragraph after paragraph.

One night her mother mentioned that she had met a man and that she was interested in "taking things to the next level." These words found wings. I noticed that her daughter sat up in bed and fussed with her nightgown. Her mother had divorced her father when the girl was only three. She still had a relationship with him. He took her fishing when she was ten. He took her to Vermont for Christmas so that they could ski. She was a natural until she broke her collarbone when she was 14. She had to convalesce with her mother. That's the way it was. Her father was the adventure, but her mother was home.

Her mother had been alone all those years, and you would have thought that her only child would be happy to hear that she was finally finding love. After all, she had been her mother's only object of attention for years and years. Her mother was one of only two people in her daughter's life. She vowed to spend her life with her husband, being what he needed and wanted. A relationship style that stretches back to her childhood with her mother. Her mother would fill her ears with words to the point that she could not think of anything else but what her mother was saying, over and over. But they had no vow. She really didn’t owe her mother a thing.

When she hung up she mouthed the word: “shit.” I wanted to hug her. I did my best version of that. I stretched myself out over her lap because that's all that was available for me to do, and I could feel her empty stomach, tossing and turning. She thought she was past this point. Her parents were never together in life, but she had a nightlight in her mind that hoped they would be back together one day. Now she felt her heart unraveling again.

It is difficult for her to feel settled. It is difficult for her to feel calm. I've come to understand that this is actually her natural state. Her life has been turned upside down more than once and she doesn't know any other way to be. We’re alike in that way. Our partners are always speaking first and last, and we can’t do more than react to them. That’s our survival. Their lights blaze, and we hide behind the dinner table and the potted plants. We reach for the corners of the room. We are at our best when we are unseeable.

I keep my calm. And if I can have any influence over her, I will.

Her husband comes home. She doesn't say anything about her mother. She knows he doesn't care. She listens to him rant about his job. He works for the government. He complains about hypocrisy and dishonesty. She used to encourage him to do something else. He mused about becoming a teacher, but of course she stopped encouraging him. She stopped saying anything. He never gave her a chance. It's a wonder that she can hear him. In fact I don't know if she can hear anyone anymore.

In the middle of his speech, he stops. His voice dies. She looks at him with his mouth closed, and for the first time in a long time she remembers the day they got married. It was at a small church. Their best friend sang a song for them. She couldn’t hear that song now. She couldn’t find it buried under eight years of his words. Why couldn’t she remember it?

His mouth was closed for the first time at their wedding. He stared into her eyes, just waiting to read his vows. Waiting to speak.

Now, she is looking at him because she believes that she is looking at him for the last time. He sits down on his end of the bed and faces his wall. She sits back and leans her head against our pillows. She is waiting for his inevitable sigh. He is famous for his sighs. He eventually does sigh, and then he spills the words that she had heard many times in her life. It’s over.

I could have sworn that she looked right at me because I was stretched across the ceiling. If she could fall upward, I would catch her. Keep her from harm. You can’t hurt a shadow. Instead of falling up, she closed her eyes and thought about her father. He was ahead of her, racing down the mountain. The snow ripped open and left a scar that she could not follow. She had to find her own way down the mountain. And she did. (She won those medals for a reason). She was better than her father, but she never let him know that. Because after all he was her father. And even though he left her mother and ruined her life when she was just a little girl, he was the only father she would ever have.

Husbands come and go.

I did my best to make her feel safe. Outside, the rain was heavy. Long ago, she watched her father hammering down the slopes, so far ahead of her. This was the same. She shut her eyes and crashed. Her marriage was like her collarbone. But her collarbone healed. There was no getting over this. When the tears started to fall, I passed over her face and kept her in the dark. He didn’t deserve to see her cry. He didn’t deserve her anymore at all.