Ablutions

Ablutions

I have to get ready for work, what time is it? It was dark, but only because his eyes were closed. He rolled from his side to his back and opened them. It wasn’t dark any more. Dim hallway lights shone in on him, making shadows across his face as they came through the bars. There would be no work today. Only corrections.

One thing he enjoyed about being in here was how little time mattered. While very much of his life was rigorously scheduled, the days didn’t matter. Holidays, sure, but any other day was just another day. A Tuesday was just like a Wednesday, and there was very little worth taking notice of.

When he felt a pain like his bone was hot iron, singing and boiling his flesh from the inside, he didn’t wince. He let himself take in a short breath, and that was his only measure of visible surprise. This may be a day worth remembering after all.

He was still capable of conscious thought, but there was some instinct in what he recalled in that moment. Sometimes, when he faced situations that may have resulted in injury--a close call on the interstate or on a hike--his first thought had been of Jennifer.

But this time, he saw his ex-wife. Standing in a parking lot. Darkness, save for the buzzing lights of the gas station. Like a video game, where you know your objective is right in front of you, and the environment looks huge, but all that matters to you is illuminated in front of you. You have to make the right call.

She said, “I love you.” for the first time that night. She was sixteen. Ryan was two years older, about to graduate high school.

He wasn’t sure about what to do. There’s a timer in these situations, and an unlimited number of responses and scenarios to ponder. Ultimately, the obvious answer is “I love you too.” But only if one means it. And what is love to an eighteen year old male?

He was hopelessly attracted to her. He always would be. Even after 20 years together, a kid, the obvious flaws in her physical appearance, he still found her irresistible.

But there was little else. They got along well. They lived a lifetime’s worth of adventures together. Paris, Seoul, Jerusalem, and a dozen places in between. She had given him his daughter, the true love of his life, the one person he tried not to think about in here. Of all the people he had failed, he’d failed her the most. And as he started to think of her, the pain in his arm became less severe only because it now competed with the pain in his memory.

She was the only person he had ever said “I love you” to first. Of course, she wasn’t able to respond, being newly born into this world, but he said it. And he meant it. He felt cliched doing it, but he gave a brief monologue to his sleeping daughter as he paced around the hospital room.

“We are always going to be here for you. And we are always, always going to love you.”

His chest tightened as he remembered how he’d kept using “We.” Because he knew what he meant. He had told himself that, if he brought a child into this world, it would not grow up in a broken home. Come hell or high water, his child would have two parents. His parents had divorced when he was in first grade. His wife’s had divorced not long after for her. He had seen what divorce could do to a kid. 

So when Jennifer came into his life, his daughter was his weakness. As wonderful as Jennifer was, he could never forget what he’d said in that hospital room. And when his wife discovered the affair, confronted him, refused to let him divorce her, he was too weak to resist.

Jennifer had said “I love you” first as well. They were in an elevator, for the sole reason that it provided some semblance of privacy for what they wanted to do to each other. She had started crying while she was sucking his dick. As this was out of all the realms of ordinary, he stopped and knelt beside her.

“What’s wrong? I told you I was going to choke you.” He said, smiling. She had indeed challenged him previously. He felt like, maybe if she remembered, she would smile and all would be well.

“I love you.”

Shit. He was married. He had a kid. He had a job that would not look kindly on his choice of mistress should they ever be discovered. But he didn’t want what they had to stop. So he answered, “Oh, I love you too.”

Three months later, he was fired, he was dumped by his mistress, and he was still married to a woman who kept repeating, “I made a vow.”

He was walking through a wal-mart a year later when he noticed a familiar-looking couple coming toward him down an aisle. The speed at which his brain identified the man and told his body what to do was too fast for him to realize what he was doing was wrong. He lunged, and he squeezed. At some point he had pushed the man’s wife away, into a shelf of kitchen gadgets, all without removing his hands from the man’s throat.

“Jed?” The name came to him finally. Ryan had taught three of this man’s children. He had worked with his wife for 12 years. But this man was also a school board member. One of the men who had voted to have Ryan terminated.

And now Ryan was straddling him in a wal-mart kitchen aisle. Jed’s wife had rushed to his head, crying, saying muffled words. A few people who had heard the commotion gathered at the ends of the aisle, too afraid to get too close. Someone said to get the cops.

It’s crazy to think about what serves as the last thing you ever do before something happens, and that thing will never be the same again. He couldn’t remember the last time he held his little girl as a free man. Probably when she went to school that morning, because he always hugged her before school. But he had done it not knowing it would be the last time. He hadn’t assigned any significance to it until after the fact. It felt emptier that way.

She had written him for a long time. And he always wrote back. He told her about the books he was reading and nothing else. And he would finish every letter with, be good to your mama.

But she had stopped writing as she got older, busier. And he didn’t want to write to her. He didn’t have that privilege. If she wanted to talk to him, she would. If she wasn’t writing, it meant she was done with him. And he deserved that.

He figured one day she’d write him, when she was ready to communicate with her murderer father. 

He thought of his own father. Ryan had worked for him for every summer for 10 years, and yet he barely knew him. With high school, college, and girls, they had drifted apart. When the cancer diagnosis came, nobody expected Ryan to be phased at all. He was.

The last thing Ryan’s father said to him was that Ryan’s lunchbox was a good one. It wouldn’t give their position away. The medications had made him slip back into his days as a marine. He couldn’t remember the last conversation he had with his father that wasn’t marred by medicinal psychosis.

Ryan was the last one of the kids to see their dad alive. He sat next to his dad’s bed, and he had told him it was okay to let go. That, even though he wished things could have been different, he knew it was better for his dad to just let go.

And he did. A few hours later, a catheter was inserted, he emptied his bladder, and he died. He was holding on because he needed to pee.

And as Ryan lay there, the pain in his arm now more than victorious over the pain of his memories, as he mentally laughed at the memory of his dad, tears began flowing from his eyes and soaking his pillow beneath his head. They weren’t tears of sadness. They weren't tears of joy. They were tears of everything. It was every last tear he had to cry, tears like thousands of others he’d cried before. Tears that had never been cried, that had been seasoned with age, waiting for their chance. He cried tears for things he’d never thought to cry about before, for people he’d only just met, or briefly. And finally, after all of those tears had flowed, a spring of tears, so pure and clean they seemed to enliven his eyes, came forth. They were tears of relief. Of exhaustion. Of completion.