The Person You Have Called Is Not Available

Art - The Rain

Friday! Friday afternoon! I flung my work bag into the car, cranked the windows down and aircon up to chase the sauna air out of my seat, and headed home. Red light, green arrow, around the corner merge and - I'm clear! Traffic behaved for a change so I drove a minute further, then popped another brazil nut and square of dark chocolate into my mouth.  Bananas, cereal, dog food? I pondered my grocery list in my head when there was a loud -CRUMP- but no movement in the car. I rapidly swallowed, checked my mirrors and shook my headphones, no obvious problem. Sucked some chocolate nut paste from a tooth, then my tongue caught on a sharp angle which was not there twenty seconds ago. Some more prodding, first with a wary tongue then with a somewhat grotty and increasingly despairing finger. I'd lost a significant chunk of a molar. At quarter past four on a Friday afternoon. I looked out the windscreen and watched my planned weekend - and budget - waver and dissolve in the heat shimmering on the road.

I sighed, attempted to convince my tongue that impaling itself on the precipice was not a good thing to do, and spent the next 10 minutes trying to get an emergency dental appointment. Success finally, though I'd have to have an incredibly good run home to make it in time. I hung up, herded my tongue to the other side of my mouth, and tried a deep breath. I was sunburnt, hot, stinky and just wanting to get home, but the traffic I was stuck in was like a pack metallic dogs, all determined to stand nose to tail for as long as possible instead of running madly for the horizon. I spent the next half hour drawing blood with my snazzy new inbuilt fang, watching the clock whizz through the numbers towards my appointment, wrestling through traffic, and trying not to cry.

I wanted to call my husband.

Not the husband I don't have, not my future husband, not the husband who went severely insane and walked away.

I wanted to call my husband who knew the curve of my smile and cackle of my laugh. My husband who bought me a spearmint milkshake when I had my wisdom teeth out. My husband, whose chest was a familiar sanctuary against any chaos crashing against my head or heart. My husband, who died. The man-who-could-have-been. George-as-I-thought-he-was.

Grief has a wide snout full of spiky teeth and ruptured dreams.

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I spent the hour in the dentist chair swinging between how to budget in this latest expense and praying the pain would go away. Not just the pain in my jaw (now leaking up into my cheek despite the repeated jabs of anesthetic), but the unexpected right hooks of grief.

Nobody has every told me, or hinted, that the loss would snap out like a well timed punch to the nose. Not a weighted shot, the type which crunches and turns your nose into a fountain, but the slightly pulled hit which lands with a furious roar that makes your eyes water and you forget to breathe from the immediate hunger it wrenches out of you. A hunger to be away, oblivious, anywhere else but here and this moment, this glaring reminder that life hurts and people get broken.

Sometimes the past few years feel like a pregnancy, but in reverse. All the pain and trauma of labour are at the beginning of the process, with the attendant blood, tears, sobs and screaming. Then the heaviness which pulls at every joint, hauling me closer to the ground, the undeniable pull of reality, pain and dense concentration. The world has twisted in, hauled tight around my tiny, intense universe, where days and the sun move differently, and gravity doesn't work the same way anymore. A little while longer, and grief is a touch easier to live with. I have to be careful in the ways I do some things, what I speak about to people, but  while the grief is still obvious to most people, it isn't the centre of their conversation and activities. Time marches on, oblivious, and I'm not hauling around as much obvious weight, neither am I canted oddly in order to carry the wide, serious load. It's like a bump which I'm mindful and careful of, working around its presence in my life, almost accepted as part of each day. More time, maybe another trip or two around the solar system, and my grief is a secret. A tiny, pulsing secret deep in my belly. Nobody knows unless I tell them.

I don't tell them.

I don't say how some mornings I'm feeling across the bed for a shoulder or hip that isn't there, and hasn't been for years. I don't say how the weight of my empty hand sometimes crushes my chest to my mattress, choking me with remembering. I don't tell about feeling like a widow, with a distance greater than death separating me from the guy I used to love. I don't talk about how the grief sometimes knocks me to my knees, or has me sobbing into a towel or pillow or mattress at any random 2 a.m. or maybe 4:20 on an ordinary Saturday. I don't let people know that I miss the good parts of my marriage with an intensity that seems foolish, knowing the truth of the past situation. I don't talk about how I sometimes, very rarely, chide my missing husband for leaving me, for not being stronger, for missing out on seeing the boys stretch and twist and magnify into such bewildering, frustrating, fascinating creatures, while still keeping hints of who they were at birth, six months, toddler-hood and beyond. I don't explain how - a couple of times a year - I find myself composing a letter to my husband, detailing important events and irrelevant details of the boyos' and my lives, as if he's just gone for awhile, for work.

I don't say how I'm reaching for a person who never really existed, except in my heart.