You spend your whole life protecting. Protecting what? Is there something to protect? I mean, truly. Can you really protect yourself from the world around you? Can you protect the people you love? Those who have come before and those who are still to come? How can we live with the knowledge of our own vulnerability? Doesn’t it make you shudder to know how expendable we all are?
Does our own moral fiber make us stand against the eccentricities of nature? I suppose I could sit around all day while the night rises on. And then, what’s the point in that? Grow old and crooked on this porch swing, watch the world pass me by. Doesn’t it just pass me by whether I get up or not? Is it so important for me to be part of this ‘sweet old’ world?
“Hon?”
I shift my weight over so she can sit beside me. Overtime, I have imagined her voice could fill the void of a missing piece, or even deafening silence itself. It sounds like music, though no one agrees when I wistfully compare her harmony with holiness. They think I’ve gone soft, you know. Men don’t stare off wistfully. Wistfully. That’s what women do, not grown men who have hit thirty. No, there are conventions. The man of the house fixes the railing and kicks the refrigerator. He becomes drawn in by the blank mesmerizing power of television, wiping his greasy hands on his beer belly and finding humor in his masculine belch.
I move my arm from behind the swing and bring my wife closer to me. My hand loses itself in her dark strands. I don’t want to be any other husband or any other father. I don’t want to be one of the boys or my little girl’s old man. I wasn’t meant to be. But do we really have purpose? Does our lives have some sort of meaning? Or do we try to place something tangible there? A mini-van in a three car garage. A kempt front yard. Maybe a dog and a cat.
“What are you thinking?” Elizabeth snuggles into the folds of my shirt and I can feel her warm breath against me. I could sit here all day. Really. Just to feel her. Just to know that she was still here and we would be outside of time. Everything would be suspended, just me and her on the porch swing. The sun burning slowly into the horizon, the sky melding into purple from the smudges of pale blue and lavender, deep hues of yellow and dull orange.
“I’m thinking...” I pause. My mouth feels dry. “...about the advantages of being a bird. Having these lutes of Amber which I would sing with.” I adjust my arm, sliding it down her back so my hand rests on her waist, still trim after a long labor which had me shaking all throughout with this half-fear and bursting joy. “I would sing to you every morning. At the crack of dawn.”
“I would throw my pillow at you.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Though you should probably be the bird, I have such a low tremor.”
She laughs, not like silver bells. It is more of a harsh jagged sound. Elizabeth laughs with her whole mouth open, bringing in tremendous gulps of air. She pushes it into her diaphragm and it all comes out in this rush. Beautiful voice, horrendous laugh. I’ve come to love it.
“You’re waiting for your sister, aren’t you?” Can two people really be connected? I mean, connected. Is it possible for us to be soul mates, capable of finishing one another’s sentences, feel each other’s presence without even touching? Or is it simply circumstance? Living together in our love.
“I just want to ask Georgie how it went. It is her senior prom, you know.” I knew very well, as well as my wife, that I was trying to be that protective older brother. It didn’t need to be said and my false bravado was going to be nothing but false. As false as my ability to move the stars, change the universe, define the path of which my baby sister would have to walk. Just as it would be for my own baby, for Emma.
“She won’t be back for hours,” she says lazily, running her hands through my hair.
“I’m going to loose that all one day.”
She giggles. Now, Elizabeth has cute giggles, not like her laughs. She bits her lip and her teeth seem to quiver between a smile and a frown. “I won’t care.”
Our baby comes tottering out, calling out, “Daddy.” I was so proud to know she learned that before “Mommy.” I walked around for a week with my chest puffed out, like a rooster. I reach for her now and her dewy, fine eyes are filled with such unadulterated trust. I want to give her all the trust in the world. I want her to believe in me. I want to be there every step of the way, and I feel as though I’ve missed so much when I’m at work, when I am in the backyard, when I’m not with her every second. Every bedtime story I miss, my heart aches. Every blink of an eye, I know that some precious moment has flew by and I try to catch it, but it just slips through my fingers. She grabs a handful of her mother’s hair and wraps her other hand around one of my fingers. One day she’ll let go and it scares me because I’m going to have to let her go, too.
“Will, don’t you wish we could stay like this forever?”
My finger runs along the grooves I’ve cut in the swing those first days when we moved in. It reads our initials. “W.D. & E.B.” I can almost trace this day backward to the very beginning. To the day I carried Elizabeth over the threshold. Her train had gotten in the way and I tripped. We fell into our house, our home. Our backs were arched against the hardwood floor in pain, but we laughed and laughed. It sounded like cats screeching. I kiss my wife on the lips and my daughter on the forehead.
“Maybe we can.”
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