"...Sometimes, rather than reach for what one could be, we choose the comfort of the failed role, preferring to be the victim of circumstance, the person who didn't have a chance..."
--Merle Shain

I wouldn't live through the night.

Between the palpitations of my heart when I moved and the loss of breath that accompanied them, I knew one thing for certain -- I would suffocate under the weight of my life by morning.

Too tired to scream, too frightened to move, the blankets were wrapped around me so tightly that I couldn't have freed myself without more energy than I had left. Five days without food. A day without water. And one hundred and sixty eight hours without him.

Three a.m., the witching hour. Reflected light from the streetlamps down the road filtered in the windows, illuminating only a short distance from them. I was outside the ring of fire.

One movement could be a lifeline or a death cry. The number for the crisis line lay on the chair next to the phone. If I only freed one arm to dial with, someone would probably save me. Redeem me.

Hot tears burned my dry eyes. I hardly had the water left to cry.

>From behind, it felt as if arms were wrapped around me. Mother's arms. Something my own mother was unable -- or unwilling -- to do. I checked to see if I was asleep or hallucinating. It still hurt. I had to be awake.

Cry...and wash away.

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1987. An impetuous rebel dressed in black has a drink she should have said no to. A boy stands a full head above her, thin as a rail, hair as dark and blue as crow's wings, face all angles and eyes.

"We're out of beer," someone says to him. He turns slowly, his reflexes dulled by the jack and coke.

Then they are driving. The boy and she. Two others in the front seat. A car that shouldn't have been street legal. Strong with artificial courage, they say something to a car that is faster and better.

Falling. They are falling. All of them. The car is upside down and she cannot find the way up. The boy has pushed her to the floor and is on top of her, and screams ring in her ears.

Red lights spin around her. His head is in her lap, his blood staining the white shirt, leaving an imprint of his ear. Blood is coming from his ears. All she sees is red. From the lights, from the fire engines, from the blood. She doesn't know if any is her own.

All of this blood. All of these aborted hopes for some sort of a future that won't ever be realized. All of these lights. All of this death. All for more beer.

Police swarm and she is shaking. They ask her if she needs a blanket. She says no, that she is being wrapped in too many arms already. The blood is drying on her hands and cracking. They ask her if she needs a towel to get it off, but she refuses. She asks instead for a pen.

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There's no denying the voice that tells me to cry. From an empty place that seems to be endless, the tears still come.

"What did I do wrong?" I say aloud, still afraid to move. If my hands were free, they'd be unable to grasp the tissue that I need. The last thing on my mind is what's running down my face.

Nobody answers, and his side of the bed is cold. It's covered with books and wadded tissues and a lot of pills. I could take them. Speed this along, get it over with before my heart decides to repay me for years of lodging with rebellion and a siezing.

It hurts to have my hand there. There in the space that was his. He would turn at night and lay a hand on my hip, a familiar weight in an uncertain time. His scent still on the pillows, I couldn't bring myself to inhale too deeply, for fear of using it up before I had a chance to say goodbye.

"Why? Why did this happen to me?"

Because, child...you are strong enough to take it.

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She could smell her own blood. It made drips on the floor behind her, leaving a crimson trail of perfect circles, smudged where her feet trod through it.

"Nurse!"

Scared to get the sheets dirty -- they were so white -- she couldn't sit down, though her swelled lower abdomen cramped like it was being squeezed from within.

Lights whipped past. The morphine made her dizzy and she could only make out bits and pieces of the doctors' words. "...baby's heartbeat is irregular..." "placenta over the mouth..." "emergency c-section...-now-."

Five hours later, she half-awoke in a stupor to find her womb empty and lifeless. Two nurses took turns pressing near her incision. It burned with a pain that could only have been phantom in its intensity. Nothing hurts that much.

Her daughter was laid in her arms hours later, after the anesthesia wore off. The baby had her father's eyes, her mother's hair, and belonged to the couple who anxiously awaited the news of what their breeding cow had borne.

The lawyers offered her the paper to sign. It disgusted her. In the years after, would the baby know her with some sort of genetic memory? Would she know the same pains, the same thoughts, the same joys? Would she be connected somehow, waking at night with an unfamiliar woman's face in her dreams that seemed as familiar as her own, though she'd never known her?

She signed on the dotted line, and walked away with a strength she didn't know she had. In the airport, instead of a magazine or book to occupy the three hours home, she bought instead a blank journal.

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"But I'm -not- strong enough. Can't you see that he's killed everything that was good in me? Can't you see that I've given myself away and there's nothing left? Can't you see that there -is- no me?"

The gas was on in the kitchen, but I wasn't patient enough then. I switched it off, talking to the air, opening the window. Beneath my feet, a rug he'd given me for my birthday. On the counter, a blue basket with cards he'd sent me, assuring me he was true. On top of the refrigerator, extra cereal we'd bought on his last day at home.

"I can't get away from this. I'm done for. None of the knives are sharp enough to cut skin."

Wearing only a thin t-shirt and underwear, I opened the back door. Cold couldn't touch me. It was colder inside than outside.

"I can't understand it. I can't cry anymore, I can't reach out. I can't even kill myself right."

All things destroyed in nature will regrow.

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He was always so big when she remembered him. All daddies are monumental in the eyes of daughters who adore them. Hulking shoulders, stong eyes, hands with a span twice her own.

This was not her father. Not this thin, gaunt shadow under white hospital sheets, connected to a thousand tubes that were keeping him "alive". This pale representation seemed so small and removed from the father of memory.

Cancer eats away more than the soul.

His spiderlike hands showed blue veins beneath paper skin, making the same motions of habit, though over half of his brain was gone. When the tumor burst, it had taken his sight, most of his hearing, all of his speech, and, if the doctors were to be believed, all of his thought.

Still, his motions were the same. His breath was wet and filled with labor. When her mother spoke his name or when she spoke in his ear, telling him of her arrival and how she loved him still and called him Daddy, his face would contort into a gruesome parody of a tragic mask, tears welling in his sightless eyes.

"It's okay, Daddy, I'm here. It's okay. I'll take care of mom. I love you, Daddy, don't cry. Please don't cry."

Forty-seven days later, he still cried at the sound of her voice, but his breath came shallower and thicker by the hour.

It wouldn't be long now, they told her.

She prayed for death. His. His release. Her father was already dead.

When it came, she couldn't cry. She was the strong one, the one who was oldest, the furthest removed. She had to be everyone else's strength and arms and motion while they were frozen in a place she would never be.

She didn't realize until later that she barely knew him. That he was Daddy, bringer of candy and R-rated jokes and giver of information about engines and financial planning and marital advice. As a man, he was much of a mystery, foreign to her as the moon.

Half-way between Norfolk and Portland, on a desolate stretch of road under the shadow of a snow-capped mountain, behind a 7-11, she cried for the man she'd never know. She cried for the pain in his face and the heaviness of the steps he'd taken, knowing she'd been on more than one occasion a source of weight on his ankles.

She wanted to call her mother. Ask her questions and to ask if she could drive back home, back to where he lay in the ground. Knowing that it wasn't possible and that it would only hurt her remaining parent to ask -- she picked up the notebook on the seat and wrote to her father, begging for one thing: his forgiveness.

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Wailing. Keening for the loss and the emptiness that followed, I screamed to the sky, not caring if I woke the neighbors or woke the dead.

He's gone, he's gone, he's not coming back, I've lost the last thing in my life with meaning, and I'm powerless to change it. My life is over, my life is gone, sleeping in a bed in New Jersey where he doesn't even remember my name.

Every step through the silent house pulled up a new memory, a new loss, a new betrayal.

I stood in his closet, breathing him deeply and crying silent tears into the last shirt he'd worn. I am paralyzed, I thought, and nothing can touch me.

It will come again in time.

I felt like screaming again. Like screaming until my throat bled and my heart stopped and I could drown on my own blood. Choke on my tears and my pain and let the life end where it fell.

Watch for the light in the darkness...

The sun was coming up. The room brightened and glowed with dawn's fire. Wrapping myself in the blankets and burying my head in the pillows, I screamed again, this time strangled by an unspent sob, speaking in primal tongue of the life that I should have had.

I should grow old with the man I love, in a house by the sea, writing books that matter and following the tide's ebbing with my own light growing shorter until we die in each other's arms.

A dream and a life ended at midnight, January 10th.

I couldn't find a razor. Instead, I picked up a pen.