retreat

Day 43

Don't write about what you know. Write toward what you want to know...in making that peculiar shotgun leap toward what we supposedly don't know, we transform our vision of what we are.

--Colum McCann

I always knew how "Chordoma Dance" would end, and I guess you did, too. The suspense was not in how Rich got over the chordoma, but how we got through it. Rich's footwork was dazzling, always; I lurched and stumbled behind him, damning the road we were on but helpless in making it safe from the bombs that exploded here and there, at first, and then -- everywhere.

So I did a retreat, verb and noun.

Removing myself from what didn't matter into the world where the only thing that mattered was leaving no matter how much Rich tightly held to life, and I held to him, but the grip slips while moving backwards and I had no answer when Rich, near the end, pleaded oh, E.T., how did this happen, how did we get here.

Being on retreat for the past years would explain nothing, I knew; only a front-row seat into the pain and sorrow that would dissolve neither by ignorance nor knowledge but by sucking it into the hole left by that boy who loved me more than I could ever absorb.

I try not to look backwards, much. I look forward, a little. I cry, a lot. And I soak in the love that remains.

Candace