There was a quietness in the air, almost like the sound waves in the world had completely stopped. I realized it was dead silent in my sleep before my waking mind knew it. I felt exposed, and I was used to feeling a certain nightly calmness was absent. Something felt out of equilibrium, but I had not physically seen anything, except the vivid unreality of my dream that I was suddenly torn from.
This dream was out of the ordinary. Normally, I experience a recurring set of dreams with similar timelines, which involve me remembering the previous instance but trying to direct myself on a new course. This one was different.
In my dream, I found myself on all fours, on a cold hardwood floor, incredibly weak. So weak that I could not get up. My breathing was labored and I felt sick. I was in my bedroom, but all of the colors had changed. The sheets that were dark blue were now grey. The white wall color was now a deep blue. Instead of two closets, there was one. The door to this singular closet was open. In the doorway was a massive pile of clothing that seemed to be pouring out. In my dream, as in reality, we have a tall standing mirror on the back wall of the closet. I crawled to the pile of clothes. They were not mine, nor my wife’s. The clothing seemed new. t-shirts, jeans, heavy jackets, snow pants, hoodies, and socks. I grabbed a single sock that looked small enough to be an infant’s. It was dark grey with three white horizontal parallel lines at the top. This piece of cloth felt significant. A heaviness welled up inside me, and I quickly sifted through the pile of clothes to find the other one. I became frantic and my breathing rapidly increased which brought about a feeling of lightheadedness. My heart began to beat faster and faster. I could not find the matching sock. An overwhelming sense of dread filled my body as if something terrible might occur if I could not find the match. As I continued to scratch at the pile, I began to sob. In between each heaving inhale and exhale I was muttering “he needs it. He can’t go if he doesn’t have them. How is he supposed to go if he doesn’t have them!”. I clawed through the pile as fast as I could. So fast, I was past the point of noticing the difference between any piece of clothing my hands touched. The room seemed to be getting darker the faster I dug. I clawed, dug, shoved, pushed, pulled, moving ever deeper into the closet but never felt any progress.
Eventually, fatigue set in, and there seemed to be no end. Then, with a final sweeping motion of my arm, my hand hit something cold and flat. I stopped, my breathing labored. Sweat poured down my face and I stared down into the blackness below me. Looking up, I noticed there was the tall mirror that I had seen every day for the past 3 years. The mirror reflected to me the circular hole that I had dug through the clothing. Somehow this pile maintained its structure of an unorganized pile around a perfectly circular hole, which created a cylindrical crawl space. Past this space I could see the end of our bed, the sheets hanging sideways off of the bed. I shifted my focus from the bed to the outline of my face in the mirror. My eyes adjusted to the contours of my face. It was unclear if the face I was seeing was mine, but I could see the outline of my cheeks, and jawline, and my eyes seemed sunken into my face. I did not recognize this person, but I knew it was me. I moved my face closer to the mirror hoping I could see more detail. I stared. At that moment, I noticed a slight movement near the bed and shifted my focus to see what it was. I heard the banging of feet against the hardwood floor and just as I recognized the sound, a figure of a girl shot past the doorway and ran out of the room. I could hear the pounding footsteps as they sped through the living room, and out of the front door.
Silence.
I was back in my bed. Something happened. I was half asleep and awake. It was too quiet. A feeling of emptiness overtook me, and I forced my eyes open. The large floor-to-ceiling windows in front of me revealed the grey light of the morning. I felt cold and warm at the same time. There was a chill from the other end of the bed, but I felt the escaping warmth where I was lying. I turned over and no one was there. Odd. I never knew her to be an early riser. In my hypnopompic state, I thought I saw what appeared to be snow on the ground and flurries in the air. I rubbed my eyes, shook my head, and stumbled out of bed with a sheet wrapped around my ankle. It was freezing. I shuffled further towards the glass-paned sliding door, folding my arms in an attempt to maintain the warmth from my bed.
“What the hell…” I mumbled.
I shut the door and exhaled long and deep. Now out of my state of sleepiness, I ran over to my closet, twisted the old knob, and swung the door open. Still holding the knob in my bent wrist, I leaned over into the cold dark space of the closet. Neat, clean, and mostly in order. I stepped in and looked around, not looking for anything in particular. Closing my eyes I tried to remember the details of my dream, the feeling of clawing the heap of clothing, the desperation and exasperation. The feeling had lost some of its potency, but there was a deep lingering sense of dread. It was the feeling of something unwanted coming true. A type of forecast. A sense of a long-term semi-conscious knowing that if I continued on this path, in this way, then things in my life would drastically change. It’s the type of knowing that brings an opportunity for action, but our mind is so out of tune with what needs to be done. Blindness. A lens drastically out of focus. The wave of unrealized selfishness suddenly reveals itself and engulfs me.
I closed my eyes. Silence.
Now I felt fully awake. There was still an odd feeling sitting in my stomach. The room felt much colder than normal and I couldn’t hear any air from the vent above. I grabbed my thermal leggings and hoodie, put them on, and left the room. The path from the bedroom to the main room that led into the kitchen was only several strides away. I tried to walk as fast as possible to make it to the area between the living room and the kitchen island, where I always stood to view the lake through the window every morning. As I made my way to this spot, I noticed that the kitchen was dark. There was no sound of the coffee pot or light coming from the single overhead recessed light above the breakfast table. The light was even in each space around the main room. There was no one there.
Then I remembered.
I paused, listening for movement. No sound.
Sluggishly I walked over to the front window to confirm that I was awake. As I was staring at both cars in the driveway, I pulled my focus from them and began to replay our morning routine in my mind. I remembered the bright light from the lamps in my eyes, the smell of coffee coming from the kitchen, the feeling of not wanting to leave our house, and the overwhelming feeling of warmth on cold winter days. She was gone. Forever.
As I walked back towards the bedroom over the same path I kicked something small but solid. It flew straight out in front of me, bounced off the solid wood door to the bedroom, and changed direction opposite the door’s angle. I heard a plastic smacking sound against the wall. I had an idea what this might be, but it was usually plugged into the wall on Aria’s side of the bed.
I began to replay my dream in my mind and tried to piece together the fragmented moments that I remembered from it. The oddities of this dream seemed to stack up and it reminded me that I was not ok. I strode through the last portion of the distance to my bedroom, pushed open the bedroom door, and peered into the room. There was a single usb charger lying on the floor equal distance from the bed and the wall. I could see a small sharp dent in the baseboard where it had been propelled into, then ricocheted to where it sat now.
Walking a few more paces, I picked the adapter up off the floor. I examined it in the light coming from the window. There was already a familiarity with this piece of plastic. I knew its contours, blemishes, and colors. I was not staring at it to take in some new visual information about it but used this as an opportunity to stop and think. At this point, I noticed a yellow slip of paper on the desk, under a book, beyond my view of the thing in my hand. There were rarely slips of paper lying around in any areas other than the study. Lying flat and angled, the left edge of the paper was parallel to me. The note was pressed by the last book she read. I shifted the book off of the note. There was a short, handwritten line in the middle of the paper. How had I not noticed this before?
It read: For you
“What the…”, I whispered to myself. I’ve been in a fog for so long that I didn’t see the last letter my wife wrote until now. I flipped it open. In beautiful, small, cursive writing, the letter said:
I am not quite sure how to begin this or even end it. I know this past year has been really difficult for us. We definitely did not expect this. We have watched two of our family members and three friends go through the same thing. I never thought it would be me, but here I am.
I keep thinking of what life will be like without me and where I will go afterward, For most of my life I did not think about death or what comes after. It has been difficult not to contemplate death in light of what has transpired over the past year. When I try to see the future, I do not see myself in it. I am not giving up, but I want you to know what I’m thinking. We have been at this for so long and as it gets worse, I do not see a way out.
Since the beginning, we have pushed to seek a respite. We have not found that yet. We are both tired. It has been difficult, but have helped each other throughout.
When I go, don’t lose yourself. Keep doing what you love. Don’t let the wind fall out of your sails. Rely on your friends around you. Please take care of yourself.
The house is not important, your soul is.
I love you more than you know.
~ A.
I picked up the letter and read it again. Again. Three more times. I was frozen. I felt my face grow hot and my heart beat faster. I sat down on the cold hardwood floor, with my back against the edge of the bed, still staring at the yellow piece of paper. I let out an exhale that seemed to draw out my anxiety. Like a strong river pulling debris along its current, the anguish of never knowing her last thoughts left my body with my breath. Numbness had taken over. Familiar, yet deeper. Then, a sliver of delight. A warmth. Optimism.
The silence of the house early in the morning was not out of the ordinary, but on this particular morning, the silence echoed. The stillness exposed loneliness. The presence that had filled this house was gone. At this moment, I became honest with myself. I was not blindsided by this letter but revived, and the contents of it confirmed that the person I remembered was the person who actually lived.
I got up and walked slowly over to study on the other side of the house. This room also had a window that faced out to the lake. This room was much larger than the adjacent bedrooms. Aria loved this room. When we bought the house, I found her standing in front of that window for half an hour, staring at the lake. Every morning, I would find her, curled up in a chair, looking at the lake.
The door to the study was shut and inside it was dark. I grabbed the handle and paused. I knew she was not in the room, but a part of me, every morning, had to check for the possibility. I pushed the door open, letting the handle go as I stood in place. She was not here. She had not been here for almost a year. Her coffee mug was still on the corner of her desk. The green field jacket was still hanging on the closet hook. The photo of us standing by the lake in the backyard was still hung on the wall next to the window. The place she loved most.
Silence.
~
The digital beeping of my office jolted me back to the physical world. I quickly reached up and hit the silent button to cut off the loud noise. I was always surprised at how loud this thing was. Rarely did I use it. The only people who had been calling me on this had been Fei and Malik. The ringing tone was somewhere between a fire alarm and a representation of an analog ring in a digital tone. On days that I was particularly sleepy in this small cube of an office, this phone ended any potential pathway to sleep. It was probably engineered to do that.
I sat up in my chair and tapped the history button on the desk phone. It was a conference-type phone that had a visible microphone and a small speaker attached. This was a newer version so, of course, it had a touchscreen that did its best to mimic a smartphone menu. A very long list of calls showed up in a vertical list. One missed call from Malik at 3:12 p.m., but no voicemail. Good. In the age of text messaging and constant emails, I had learned to not ever use voicemail again. The extremely thin blue scroll bar on the right of the window indicated that I had a large amount of missed calls. None were called back to, indicated by an asterisk next to the number. I tapped and pressed the scrollbar and slowly pulled my finger down across the touchscreen. Numbers flickered by. Many were the same number, with random spots of ones I did not recognize. Well, forgotten. I came to the end of the list. August 15, 2022, 9:25 a.m. It was Malik’s first call to me in our new location. Seven years ago. I tried to remember the conversation. I knew there was a lot of laughter and excitement, but also naïvete.
There was a certain solace in naïvete, which could blind you from the ill will of others. This place could be comfortable. I thought we reminisced about childhood by remembering how much we didn’t know at that particular point in time. I had many memories of my childhood, but none seemed coherent or linear. They were snapshots. Three-second videos on a loop sequence. They were instances of feeling, pain, joy, loss, and elation. None of them felt quite real, but I remembered experiencing them. There were small, unimportant details that were fastened to my memory stores, like the feeling of the kitchen floor of our first house, the rotting wood of the handmade benches in the woods behind that house, turning too sharp on my bike and falling into a ditch. Each of these, and more, were imprinted. Their contents did not indicate importance and I could not know why they were always accessible. Why were those specific memories? What were they attached to?
I knew I should call Malik back. He might have had something important to say about the project.
I sat there, staring at the last entry in the call list, smiling, and remembering the feeling of being in a new location. At that time, everything felt like the beginning of an endeavor that would eventually take us elsewhere. I remember smiling and being filled with deep optimism. That still exists inside me, but it has considerably been reshaped by a conglomerate of tiny events. In anticipation, I expected a culmination event to occur. Some endpoint to be reached. A flash of light. An explosion. Maybe sudden death, but it never came. The ever-so-small happenings of life, as trivial as they might be in the moment, add up to a mass that can become larger than we are. To contain it alone is burdensome. Malik had been my support through many of my life changes
I shook my head to clear my thoughts and came back to reality. Quickly, I picked up the phone, navigated to the top of the list, and pressed select. The dial tone rang in my ear.
“Hey… are you busy?”, said Malik in a hurried tone.
“No, not at all”, I said, in a semi-excited tone, waiting for some hopeful news about something.
“The board, in all of its wisdom, decided to pull back on the inquiry. I don’t know who talked to them, or what they said, but the board was appeased for now. I think we are lucky.” " ….wow, I can’t believe it”, I said, mouth agape.
“My opinion is that we continue like normal. Stay the course and continue the work like there was never any intervention”, Malik said plainly.
“Yes, please can we do that?”, I asked.
“I would love to”, said Malik.
“… finally.”
Finally. Back to work. The amount of emotional and mental capacity this has taken from me was hard to measure, but I felt its effects. I pulled out my phone and ed Fei the news. I’m sure she already knows:
Me: Apparently they pulled back the investigation. We’ll see if it actually sticks…
Fei: Don’t celebrate yet.
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