Boys
I feel them right now. I can hear their breathing, soft in the bed sheets and blankets in a world of comforters that smell like fabric softener and safety. They are not ready to wake up yet; it’s eight hours between us and although I am half-way through my day they sleep now until Saturday morning comes and cartoons and friends and the mall and whatever adventures they have planned for the weekend.
They sleep, and we are awake here, far away from them, and increasingly farther away from everything, including, depressingly, their thoughts. I know this. I feel the distance has become magnified or has burned deeper into my heart and theirs. I cannot bridge it with letters or emails or even phone calls. They know they have a daddy and that he is not around and maybe they talk sometimes with their friends about it but I wonder if they put my absence into the same category where their friends put their divorced and absent fathers. I am so sad I want to cry but there isn’t time for that. It’s like the emotion is totally gone.
She feels it, too. This thing has killed our hope for reconciliation or future. There is nothing now but contention, argument and negotiation.
They all sleep. It’s 4:30 in the morning for them and in a few hours I should be making pancakes, bacon and scrambled eggs. She likes omelets; I’ll make one for her and me and we will share it because the boys don’t like onions (no boys like onions). We’ll have good coffee, clean up and head out for some little adventure.
This won’t happen today. Today they will wake up without their father. Their mother will have to do all of this, and all that she normally does. She is tired, and growing tired of being alone, and of not hearing from me and more importantly not hearing the right things from me at the right times. She is ready for a change; any change. For someone to care for her, because I can’t. For a future that is solid; not filled with the doubt of deployments or the fear of threat levels or telegrams or late night worried calls that cut off in the middle of hurried explanations.
They all sleep. Just ten minutes have passed and I see them all in separate beds moving slightly with the rhythms of the last hour before waking. I walk into our bedroom and see this beautiful woman who loved me once and now has lost hope and lost me and lost perspective. I move to her, lean down and kiss her on the forehead; I have to leave now, because I’m not really there and this can’t last so I move to one boy’s room; he is a teenager now. I missed that one. I missed Jr. High for him and ball games and band concerts and probably somebody else told him about girls and boys and dating. He is a reader, his room full of books: Tolkein, fishing, fast cars. He likes these things. I see him turn away from me in his sleep and his hair, always messy, never looked so beautiful since the day he was born. He makes a noise and I cross myself for him, kiss him while he sleeps and move into Tommy’s room.
Seven now and he is going to be a black belt in Tae Kwon Do next year and his world is so simple. His room is messy, like a seven-year olds’ should be. Books everywhere, race cars on the window sill, and toys from Christmas under his bed, in his closet, and probably in the clothes hamper, too. When he is awake, he is totally awake; he runs everywhere, jumps into life every day with the excitement of the promise of new adventures and friends and trust and the total absence of pain and regret. He has no concept of these things; his innocence will be broken soon enough by someone close to him, and he will learn like all of us not to trust, not to seek the middle way, not to bridge, but to wall-up and surround himself with the protection of isolation and wariness.
But not now. For him it’s still almost time for cartoons, for a surprise telephone call from someone, maybe his daddy. This shit is killing me. I can’t go here anymore. I can’t stay in this place so far away from them and I can’t leave these people here to fail slowly, receding back into the old ways of corruption and dependence.
I leave his room in my head, and walk down the wood-floor hallway, past her room, turning left into the dining room, past the table where they pray for me everyday even though they can’t remember what I look like anymore. I go through the kitchen door and out into the present wilderness of my existence here and they’ll never even know I was there, because it is all a dream. I just want to wake up and start over.
I don’t know how anymore.
They sleep, and we are awake here, far away from them, and increasingly farther away from everything, including, depressingly, their thoughts. I know this. I feel the distance has become magnified or has burned deeper into my heart and theirs. I cannot bridge it with letters or emails or even phone calls. They know they have a daddy and that he is not around and maybe they talk sometimes with their friends about it but I wonder if they put my absence into the same category where their friends put their divorced and absent fathers. I am so sad I want to cry but there isn’t time for that. It’s like the emotion is totally gone.
She feels it, too. This thing has killed our hope for reconciliation or future. There is nothing now but contention, argument and negotiation.
They all sleep. It’s 4:30 in the morning for them and in a few hours I should be making pancakes, bacon and scrambled eggs. She likes omelets; I’ll make one for her and me and we will share it because the boys don’t like onions (no boys like onions). We’ll have good coffee, clean up and head out for some little adventure.
This won’t happen today. Today they will wake up without their father. Their mother will have to do all of this, and all that she normally does. She is tired, and growing tired of being alone, and of not hearing from me and more importantly not hearing the right things from me at the right times. She is ready for a change; any change. For someone to care for her, because I can’t. For a future that is solid; not filled with the doubt of deployments or the fear of threat levels or telegrams or late night worried calls that cut off in the middle of hurried explanations.
They all sleep. Just ten minutes have passed and I see them all in separate beds moving slightly with the rhythms of the last hour before waking. I walk into our bedroom and see this beautiful woman who loved me once and now has lost hope and lost me and lost perspective. I move to her, lean down and kiss her on the forehead; I have to leave now, because I’m not really there and this can’t last so I move to one boy’s room; he is a teenager now. I missed that one. I missed Jr. High for him and ball games and band concerts and probably somebody else told him about girls and boys and dating. He is a reader, his room full of books: Tolkein, fishing, fast cars. He likes these things. I see him turn away from me in his sleep and his hair, always messy, never looked so beautiful since the day he was born. He makes a noise and I cross myself for him, kiss him while he sleeps and move into Tommy’s room.
Seven now and he is going to be a black belt in Tae Kwon Do next year and his world is so simple. His room is messy, like a seven-year olds’ should be. Books everywhere, race cars on the window sill, and toys from Christmas under his bed, in his closet, and probably in the clothes hamper, too. When he is awake, he is totally awake; he runs everywhere, jumps into life every day with the excitement of the promise of new adventures and friends and trust and the total absence of pain and regret. He has no concept of these things; his innocence will be broken soon enough by someone close to him, and he will learn like all of us not to trust, not to seek the middle way, not to bridge, but to wall-up and surround himself with the protection of isolation and wariness.
But not now. For him it’s still almost time for cartoons, for a surprise telephone call from someone, maybe his daddy. This shit is killing me. I can’t go here anymore. I can’t stay in this place so far away from them and I can’t leave these people here to fail slowly, receding back into the old ways of corruption and dependence.
I leave his room in my head, and walk down the wood-floor hallway, past her room, turning left into the dining room, past the table where they pray for me everyday even though they can’t remember what I look like anymore. I go through the kitchen door and out into the present wilderness of my existence here and they’ll never even know I was there, because it is all a dream. I just want to wake up and start over.
I don’t know how anymore.
-30-
Copyright, 2003. Tom Kinton
Baghdad, Iraq
posted by tomk at 8:21 AM
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