Under Light and Shade.

 
My Rose, my Wife. She has today suggested threats of leaving me; unless, every day, I put the junk I write out there. And since I am still obsessed with her, such dread is a gun to my left temple, “Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Hey, don’t push that thing. It hurts.”

Here’s my angle on things: Last night took its time with me. I laid here so tired and in pain, so full of thought. At Two in the am I gave in to one of those Phenergan. Works great for nausea, but it also puts you to sleep for too long. Somewhere, I slept. I did awake at times--when Rose got up. I told her I would rise with her, to do anything she needed. I then, I think, heard her say I should go back to sleep, to which I said, I’m sorry, to which she told me to not be sorry, with an insistence she was sure of. I was back to sleep in seconds.

Into the morning and afternoon I slept; waking for moments of drink and pee. Regretful of the time, I came to life and it was somewhere around three in the afternoon.

When later my Rose came home to rush through the packaging and card-writing campaign for Joe--our cool friend in Eureka--to get it on a truck by night. At the Post Office, they told Rose that for ten bucks it would get there the day after Joe’s birthday; for thirty they could guarantee that it would arrive the day after Joe’s birthday.

This was also the subject of sleepless thought. Rose had written a letter that pushes the envelope and out. What was once unknown has now been revealed. But what has been shown? What has not been told? Words and their telling can sound off in a multiple of tones in a single sentence. If it is not exact or the declination off by a degree, the target gets missed.
When the words are put down and sent away, not yet to be read but apart from the one who, in pain, writes it; how can we know the immediate response--how the reader’s eyes can transform one reflection of static motion into the same but different light. Or the muscles of their face configure in their own defined terms, communicating phases and phrases they themselves do not know...

...And I lost it at configure. That full-on jaded thought faded when I walked away. Later. Now. I picked up this put down, the paragraph ending in, know... now, maybe three hours later. I don’t know if it is gone or if it is retrievable. This tells me I must remain, entangled to the notion I was writing. To drop it and run to anything else is to perform harm, to warp the reflection, make what was to be into some other thing, now not the same; flogged, crippled, deformed... what was first whole and lovely of itself become something new, of its own beauty, where the flaws cease to be flaws, become a perfection all its own and ought to be. And now I look at it. It is sitting there under light and shade.