Remembering to breathe

Remembering to breathe

It’s a foggy, rainy day here. I’ve started a pair of gloves for my son – orange, as requested. And I’m mulling things to pack up for another package for my Secret Pal.

I actually got out and did a few things this week, mainly knitting-related: knit with the gals (Kathleen, the pie was great! And I saw you on Channel 7 last night!) (also hellos to Anne and Ruth and everybody, again), went to Javaroom (waves to everyone), went to check out some candles (hi, Tattoo Queen! Thanks!) and play with kitties and stuff. We now have corralled the partly-assembled legos that were all over the floor, and they’re under the couch, waiting for more fooling around. Thank you thank you thank you for those.

Today’s been surreal. Sucky. I found my beloved’s small, tidy file of papers from when he first moved to the US (of course he had them neatly filed away), so I now have his National Insurance documents for the UK. Whee. I also found a couple of old letters from women he’d been involved with before I met him. I knew in intimate detail what the significance of two were, but not quite on the third one. At any rate, this set off a huge wave of physical memory and pining for him (not to invoke the dead parrot sketch, but that’s the word for it)(isn’t language a tricky beast). I can see him in my mind’s eye, I can too-easily visualize X(s) from photos (which I insisted he destroy, years ago) and a few deeply uncomfortable social encounters. And we loved each other passionately. And I’m caught in a vortex of remembering it. I can function, but I’m doing a lot of crying today.

When it came out, we saw “The English Patient” together, several times; the Ralph Fiennes character and how he is about Katherine always reminded me powerfully and viscerally of my husband, in his intensity, a slight physical resemblance, some personality traits, and of course the brilliance. He whispered to me when we were leaving the movie theatre, about a couple sitting behind us, “she’s wondering if he’d go back to a cave for her,” and squeezed my hand. I knew he’d do anything for me, up to and including dragging himself back through a desert. I know I made him happy. I know he had a lot of complicated, miserable relationships before we met (as did I). We were deeply possessive about each other, and territorial, and loved the certainty and rightness of having each other. That’s what makes losing him so fucking impossible to absorb—I KNOW he did not want to leave me or the kids. “I want these things written on my body.”

I have calmed down a bit about his astronomy papers, but I’m still mildly freaked out about what to do about his published work. Basically I know I don’t have to do anything, but I should at least try and assemble a list of all of it, or something. Bloody astrophysics. See, this is what happens when you fall in love with a rocket scientist, there’s all this rocket science stuff in the attic.

Breathe. Just breathe. Keep on breathing. Re-knitting the glove, this time on larger needles. Keep trying until it works.