vow 2 u

I could hear her in the chaos, taking her breath. Guns drawn, not yet blazing, and I said, “Are you gonna be okay with this?” She looked at me. I wanted to say, Yeah, of course I’m talking to you. But she knew.

She always knew.

The first bullet fired, ripping through the air. “Are you okay?” she asked me.

I glanced down. No. Nothing was all right — not the endless violence and not the war wagering and not the here she was in harm’s direction not two years after my vow to protect her against every kind of bad. 

“I love you.” I said it with my lips and she motioned it back, everything slow-mo. I reached slowly down and felt the fabric of my shirt sticky and warm between my forefinger and thumb. I studied the blood, which ran down my hands, touching my knuckles. Browner than I imagined blood would be.

And warmer, too.

“Don’t say that,” she said — no, demanded. “Don’t say that to me, not now — not ever, do you understand me!” I understood. “You’re not saying goodbye to me, you’re not saying it, you’re not saying it!” Except that. Well. “‘If I should fall upon a day,’ you told me once, ‘then let that day be today, and let that fall be in love, and with you. And if I should break, then let me break, spill the love I have for you, let it pour.” She was crying. Sobbing in her sleeve. “Don’t you die, do you understand me! Don’t you dare — you promised me!”

Another bullet fired. Pcsshhhhh!

I felt a pinging against my eardrums, ringing like bells. “I’m sorry,” I said, and she took my hand in hers, squeezing my fingers as if ripping them off my hand.

Then she climbed haphazardly to her feet. She ran. She stumbled and then fell, then climbed again to her feet and continued on, pulling me behind her. “I’m sorry, I know you hurt,” she had no idea, “ . . . but we have to run!” She was strong, and my chest heaved and hoed, in and then out. My vision was a blur. I was short of breath. Gasping. Choking. “I’m sorry . . . ” She kept saying it, like repetition meant taking it all back or something. Except if she did, then I would still be there lost in chaos, lost in her voice swirling all around me, The Great Whirlwind of My Life. “Here.” She reached for the bottom of button-down, squeezing and then tugging. Tearing. Ripping. She wadded the cloth in a fist and proceeded to shove it until the quarter-sized hole which punctured my ribcage was packed with gauze made out of shirt.

I screamed.

To put it plain and simply, like a child, I screamed. “Please . . . ” I hollered. I yelled, reaching for her hands as if to put a stop to perhaps one of the more uncomfortable moments of all my life. “Don’t d-do that,” I said, in vein, of course, my breath tripping on my words.

“Please, I have to.” And she shoved harder and deeper, grunting as she pushed the cloth further inside. “We need to stop the bleeding, let me help!” she said, and so I did. “Stay with me, baby, stay with me!” I tried. “Okay, this is gonna sting a little . . . ”

Sting a little? “—!” I winced in pain and threw my head back, felt my eyes rolling in my head.

“Stay with me, baby. Do you hear me, you have to stay with me!” I heard. I just couldn’t speak. But I could recognize. Like I recognized a haze, a silver shade of nothingness around me, as if circling us, and the moment I realized my eyes were still in fact open and this was quite possibly and quite literally it, as in the infamous it, I said, “I love you,” or I said, “I lo” — or else I managed, “I l-love y” — and then basically imagined the rest, my mind faltering around the necessary blanks like the right pieces to the wrong puzzle.  

After a while, or after a half-dozen years, I could feel myself beginning to drift.  

“ . . . stay with me, babe. Stay with me,” she said, and my head teetered. “Please!” Tottered. “Stay . . . with me,” she said, “—no matter what!” And I felt her breath, her voice, hot and sporadic and so sudden, and her voice sweet like honey floating on top of rich vanilla crème, the type of sweet that’s more comfy than sweet; and the kind of comfy you just wanna put your head on and sleep at night, and share your dreams with, spread ‘em like a fire telling her your whole world, letting her in on it all and basically just talking and talking and never not talking and the whole time you’re lost (or at very least getting lost) in the infinite of talking and all that and sharing your dreams and what have you, all you can really focus on is the nail of her thumb, which you’re silently and not really secretly scratching, beneath the everlasting comfort of your forever pillow, resting your weary heads, all the tiny circles you’re creating on her skin and the images which become pictures which become this shape, and in time that shape becomes a part of you, even if only a small part — but that’s still a part because with every Great Puzzle there is a priceless picture and inside of every picture, basically these tiny pieces which fall so into place that by the end of it all, and by the time your weary bones are ready for that rest to become real and final and all that you can’t imagine your world painted any different. 

I blinked a few times and felt a calming inside my chest, like a settling. I didn’t cough, did not choke. (To be quite honest I’m not sure I was bleeding at all anymore.) And then I could see it all, clear as day — the rush of red oozing from just below my ribcage and the delicate hands of the woman I so loved wrapped tight around my waist, squeezing me in like ringing me out, her heart pleading over my heart fading, breathing into every second I had left like breathing life. I felt it all not like a fly on the wall but like somebody else all together, like an awareness trapped inside of somebody else’s decisions. And now I was crying, and so she wiped her cheek with a swipe of her hand and I could feel long strands of black hair sticking to the side of my face and feel the sweat all over my body just pouring, which I guess was her body, and the anxiety in her bones as unsettled as shaking a can of soda, and the motion in her lips as she said, “Please, stay with me.” I could feel the muscles in her lips tensing, moving to the rhythm of words I did not create, then relaxing around this tiny resolution. I could feel something wrenching inside my stomach, inside her stomach, the tremble in her core as she crumbled to the dirt, plummeted like a bag of bones, and in the wake of the worst kind of pain; the kind that happens when you’re too busy watching the person you vowed to protect, until death do you part, fade right before your very eyes, and you’re completely helpless to it — a fleeing wish of hope drifting like a burning leaf falling, turning to ash as it crumbles into the dirt.

“ — and so you have to stay with me, baby, do you hear me? You have to!” I could feel the motion in her arms. Whack! But I did not hurt. Nor did I wake up. Nor could I. “Come on, sweetie, come back to me, do you hear me? Come back to me!” I could feel, in her lips, this tingling. I swallowed every syllable she spoke, could feel not the cease of life inside my own chest but the roaring rhythm inside of hers, a harsh repetition of grief combined with agony combined with sorrow combined with—

She knelt down beside me and put her head on my chest. “I’m the one that should be here, not you . . . ” She trailed off, her voice slicing the early nighttime air with the delicacy of a hot knife cutting butter. She said, “After all, I vowed to protect you, too, remember?”

I remembered. Of course I remembered.

“Come on — breathe, dammit! Breathe!”

Agony and sorrow and — what is it? What’s that third thing?

“ — come on! Breathe, baby. You have to breathe—”

I could feel her hands on my neck, on my chest, no longer lost in decision but caught in something else entirely, a world of lost vision as well as the whirl winds of her frantic voice searching . . .

“Breathe, dammit. Breathe!” She pled, and I could feel the smack of her lips against my lips, and then an immense burst of air inside my lungs as I gasped and as I choked and as I fought for air and as I won that fight for air and as I rolled half-over suddenly clutching onto my chest, or onto my throat. Or both. Breathe. She said it over and over, but I couldn’t. Breathe. She screamed it into my chest like engraving it into my soul. Breathe. And all I could seem to do was just aware of was how I craved her so, I craved her now more than ever before, and seeing what she saw and feeling what she felt and the scent of dust and sweat all around us and how I missed her so, missed her until it hurt. Breathe. I tried. Breathe. I gasped and I choked, swallowing what felt like my tongue but tasted like blood. Breathe. I coughed and spit something up. Breathe. I did not open my eyes. Breathe. I fought, and again, gasped my way into another small victory, this one different. Breathe. I did. Was. Breathe. She leaned in and listened to my chest, smiled to my heart as she held me close, held me hard — breathe — and I breathed. And she breathed, whispering to my skin, “Live because you have to, if not for you then do it for me — promise me, promise me, do you hear me? Promise me!” She clutched onto the collar of my shirt, wrapping her fingers into fists, her eyes full of tears, her heart of whatever third thing I hadn’t yet recognized, regret, maybe, and her lungs of plea as she coughed. “Promise me.” She said it until she was out of air, too, coughing and clutching onto her chest. “ . . . promise me!” She made me swear, and so I did. I opened my eyes and I swore.

Through a debilitating fog of translucence and confusion, I swore.

“Promise me,” she said. “That’s all I ask . . . ” She pounded my chest once. Hard.

And I said, “I do.” I’d said it before and I said it now. “Right here amid rubble I do not understand,” I said, “and against a war that does not belong to me, a war that does not belong to us, I swear.” I promised, willing a smile, or else imagining myself willing a smile and then letting my mind autopilot the rest. “I’m here for good,” I said, completely unable to move. Nor could I keep a thought in my head — “Looks like you’re stuck with me forever,” I said — except for a single snapshot my mind had taken a long time ago, right before a dance with my new and beloved wife, her arms outstretched as her smile was one to be rivaled, a happiness like none I have ever seen, “I made a vow to you once, remember?” She nodded without so much as a breath of hesitation, like she couldn’t possibly answer fast enough, and the sound all around us fading but only for a moment, one which lasted precisely the time it took for me to catch the sound of my own breath, in and then out, and not a second sooner, I could feel the warmth of her cheek, muster the strength for a well-enough I was beyond satisfied with leaving alone, a gratitude I’d pay an impossible homage to forever and ever thereafter.

Her skin was warm, hot, even, charming in its softness beneath the trembling of my fingertips.

I shivered, and together we laughed. “Are you all right?” she asked me, to which I did not reply.

Because — what kind of question was that? Of course I was.

A thousand times over, yes. “If not,” I breathed, “then I will be.” I would be. “I love you,” I said, perhaps one of the more important things a person can say to another person. “I love you so much, so, so much,” I said it again and again, and it never lost its meaning once . . .

A smile touched her cheek, a tear on her lips. “I love you, too.”

Because those were vows, something built like pillars which starts at the ground and then grows up, like flowers, and the more you water and nurture those flowers the more they will grow, becoming trees becoming this, like, fathomless garden or whatever before eventually reaching the stars — “I love you,” she promised, “so much, more now than ever, and I forever will and I promise you that the love between us will always be and always will grow and it’ll go up and up and up higher and higher and higher because that was my vow to you.” A pause, she snickered and touched my cheek, kissing my ear. “Sorry, that is my vow to you.”

A minute passed, or a second, and I reached down and held the fabric of my shirt between my forefinger and thumb. It was crusty. I studied the blood on my fingertips, browner than I imagined blood would be.

“So,” she quietly began, our arms swinging, and the only sounds that of our voices and of our footsteps and of the trees and plants blowing and the wind silently howling and exactly nothing else. “You might have a few scars after all of this?” she said.

I understood.

“I hope that’s okay.” Of course it was. “You know what they say.” She squeezed onto my hand like wringing an old rag of its every drippity-drop. “Scars remind of us of who we are. Of where we’ve been,” she said, “and you, sir, nearly touched death.” She nodded once and pointed her finger at my chest, poking me hard. “Scared me to pieces, mister!” she said, timing her pokes with the words to and pieces. “But if those scars remind me each and every day that you’re still here, that you’re still with me,” she said, “then bring ‘em on. Wear ‘em with pride, wear ‘em like an armor!”

And so I did. Do. Have. Forever will. Because that’s what I’m supposed to do — live for the one I promised to protect, cherishing every moment with her because that was my vow to her, something which began in the dirt, which we planted and which grew, touching heights unimaginable, for every step taken is one toward Life’s Most Notorious Journey, a journey we chose to take together.

And that was my vow to her.