30 adoring years

Had I known, I would have asked him not to return me.

I hung from the roof and begged him to use his one chance, the one everybody gets to return somebody else’s life to their lungs. A lot of people save it for their kids just in case or their parents for a little extra time but he relinquished his to a stranger. He was the first to find me in a gutter-clean gone wrong. He lived next door but we spoke infrequently enough about nothing that mattered (did trash day get pushed for President’s Day? Has your sink been draining really slow? Is the landlord sending somebody next week about that dead tree? — and never introduced ourselves. I filed a noise complaint a year before against him for his 5 a.m. — before sunrise! I wrote in my letter — jigsaw that roused me into a beehive. 

A week before I fell and the bone ripped from my shin, he was on the phone in front of his car door as I stepped outside to sprinkle salt on my porch. And I eavesdropped then, heard him admit to another ear, that he hadn’t used his up yet and then later I used that against him. “I know you have it, please,” my tears blurred him into a shadow. “My mom is coming for dinner.” My yells curdled in the wind. He was late and I was bleeding out and yeah, call 911 please but is there enough time? And I knew, no; and he knew there was nothing either of us had to stop the bleeding as quick as it stole. And then I robbed him blind. Had you the chance to bring somebody back, had you watched them die in front of you and tried slapping them, tried the CPR you learned at the fire department months ago in an optimistic pride, screamed to no one and begged clouds for resilience until the ambulance wept onto your street, would you let them stay dead? Is it wrong to even ask that?

His mom suffered what the doctors called a series of small strokes in her brain one year after he rescued me. By then, I was a curse in his living room. She hung on and died in a cruel hospital and I watched him watch her, knowing he could have just let me stay dead and banked several more years as a son who knows his alive mother. Instead, he morphed into a grieving son and I looked at him, remembering the lines on his face and collecting his tears.

For the rest of my life, I never used mine. Not on my own mother or my brother because I imagined his need. I imagined his bones jutting from skin like mine did, his blood on the lawn. I dreamed of a reality where I repaid him and shed the blight I carried for three decades. How could I possibly use mine elsewhere? 

He deserved it for keeping my head up and cradling me from ladder to ground. At my very least, how could I not try? I found myself dreaming of equally horrific events for him so I could finally rip my shirt open, revealing a Superman logo. So I could say we share this feeling, this ability. So we could talk about it like we talked about everything else: something that happened to both of us at the same time - not something that happened to me and not him and something he did and not I. 

But he constantly told me: use it. I don’t care. Because i wanted to. No, that’s not why. That doesn’t even make sense. It should be: did you marry me because you had to? Yes, I promise. I promise.

He cried each time I lost kin, shedding tears on my dry behalf. And for 30 adoring years, he filled his chest and breathed fire. He taught me how to scream at God, how to walk on the tops of trees and the ocean floor. He jigsawed hearts into my furniture, each chair, shelf, nightstand drawer marked. The white noise fell into my dreams alongside syrupy doves and broken arrows.

I died before him anyway. Again. And he had to watch the yellow overtake my skin, the purple my hollows. He carried me upstairs each night and fed the cats — “they’re loud tonight,” he crooned, the can hovering — and I watched him watch me. How many more lines on his face 30 years later. I kept his tears in my palm like dainty seeds filling the crevice my cousin once named my lifeline. “You’ll live forever,” she told me then, 15 years before I died the first time.

I apologized to him for ruining the end of my life, for not becoming a scientist that learned to bottle this stupid gift to which the gods cursed humanity. Perhaps I could have jarred my own, perhaps others could donate theirs. I spoke into his eyes and they smiled at me. I prayed to the moon to take my sickness and give to him — remember, I could still bring him back! — but the moon ignored me. As did the mud and the stars and that one tree that has a face. I got sicker.

Sometimes I hated him for loving me so deeply, for adopting my brain and keeping my secrets as an extra rib. I hated him for it hurt more the second time I died, lumped under blankets we found on the side of the road, a ceiling made from foraged twigs.

Had I been able to predict his grief, I would have begged him to leave me ornamenting from the roof, would have bit my tongue until I swallowed it. I would have saved him, returned the cash to his wallet and slept. He would have stayed in his house, kept his mother and married Hercules. But I had not and so he changed the sheets while I vomited, learned thin hair braids on YouTube. I cursed him and us then, our happy life that deserved millennium.