Sick Joke

Awaken from a dream on that grey and snowy morning, he laughed at himself - the punchline of his own sick joke. They were in a hotel room and the sun was coming in the window. She was getting dressed and gathering her things. Fluttering about the room talking all sorts of concerns and quandaries about what to do with this and how to handle that. Watching her walk about the room, the rhythm and grace, the roll of corduroy skirt across her hips, the heavy chestnut hair he wished to live in a house of. He wondered if it were more than a dream.

She asks him to pass her the handbag on the bedside table, as he does a photo slips out. It is of she holding twins, one a boy the other a girl, infants smiling that gooey smile that is accompanied by giggles and squeaks. A lovely photo and he wonders who they are. She ceases her efforts to apply makeup and looks at him pensively through the mirror. They are Grace and Patrick she says, their father named them. Their father? Does that make you their mother? Yes.

He was happy for her because the children were so beautiful, and broken because he always wanted to have them with her. And it was here he realized it all to be only a dream. She sat down on the bed next to him and held his hand. She could see the sadness in his eyes and hear it in his breath. She didn’t tell him that it could still happen, that he could share this joy with another somehow, someway. She just sat there and held his hand, listening to him describe, in sobbing tones, the life to be lived.

The grey sky stares back at him. With eyes open he replays each heartbreak, an emotional cutting that gives him something to feel. Can he believe that loving takes this course?

The sounds remain, you are the sweetest boy I know...