All because you are leaving by Sarah Weatherby

You say you have been thinking of the past, that time before all of your headaches and brain scans, before your daughter started middle school and we’d agreed it would be the worst age except it wasn’t, your daughter still danced like crazy, played softball, shot her first javelina and we still gorged ourselves  whenever possible on $2 tacos and sopapillas with honey and butter and drank small cups of margaritas even though there were no fresh limes that summer and the lemons substituted were pithy and after those dinners we swam home through potholes and monsoon rains and more than once I admitted an abiding love for Dwight Yoakam and you swore we all spoke country when drunk. Those nights we must have looked so young, although we weren’t any younger than we are now, even if you say you have been thinking of what it means to leave, of what comes next.

In the months since I haven’t slept for more than five or six hours a night. First swathed in blankets and surrounded by books; and later, sweating even with all of the windows pried open. Initially, I could still feel the calm boredom of winter turning beyond spring, then came the hours I spent staring through the walls to where I thought the moon should be. There were handwritten letters and thrown bundles of poorly wrapped sage and twice I climbed into my dust covered canvas bag because it excluded, somehow, the still smell of the desert and later when the wild sunflowers were just past I cooked sheets of enchiladas because I never learned how to make a good casserole and on my last visit I watched as you tried to place me and couldn’t and I held your hand carefully and felt obvious and tenuous and I tried to believe that it was time, that it was a blessing, that you were just escaping down that long and metaphoric river that we all emerge from and for a brief spell I was thankful that you could swim back out into the depth of that night, all but for the grief of the man you’d married, the child you’d had.