Soul On Fire

Pep Talks And Pool Games

     "What I want to happen is this to be a lie, and tomorrow, when I wake up, this whole fiasco will have not happened at all. Like, none of it. The last year."
   
     "Well, this isn't work. What you want isn't what is going to happen."

       When life falls apart, if a girl is lucky, she can lean on her big brother, and a good pool stick for comfort.

     "Sis, I know nobody plans to rebuild their lives at thirty. But... BUT! You have your career. You have your house. You have your whole life! It'll work out! Maybe not exactly the way you  want right now. But it will".

     I was okay with this pep talk at that point in time. He was on one end of the pool table, and I was on the other. He couldn't get to me and hug me again, causing me to cry for the zillionth time that day.

       Donovan, my ever reliable brother (the older, wiser, more successful betwixt us), had the look of utter heartbreak in his eyes. In the last 365 days, I had fallen in love with my brand new job as a nurse. I had been so jaded by this career that I had in fact looked into culinary arts, driving an eighteen wheeler truck across country, and botany. All of which Donovan dissuaded vehemently.
I had fallen in love with a man. Yes, a man; the most wonderful of them. Oh, he was tall, and his eyes were silver, and his arms were strong, and his love was stronger... When I saw him... Which was for about eight to ten hours a week. Between his day job and my overnights job, it didn't leave much time for meandering until the weekends I wasn't working.

       I worked in a small hospital in a smaller rural town.  The most exciting thing to happen was someone was a drug induced heart attack. Occasionally, a bowell would block up, or a zit would morph into an infectious boil and have to be surgically repaired. I was content with that. The line of work I am in dictates that being at it for a year or less catorgizes one as a "baby nurse". Code: you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground. I was eager to experience, and practically begging for knowledge; at my preference, not the world's. Cute, right?

    Now this man of mine. There's no way I was his twin flame, because honey, he lit up my entire universe. Every cold, dark nook, every neglected cranny. Oliver seeped his love into it.  He had an observence for me that all my past relationships were abstracted of. When his eyes landed to mine, I couldn't help myself. I felt myself grin and look at the ground. He saw through the facad of apathy in my coal black spirit windows, and didn't care to tell me as such. Not even a little bit.
His line of work was not as obtuse as mine. He owned his own company, ironically enough, in landscaping. This is not without it's stressors, obstacles, and random injuries. Where I worked in the dead of night, he spent his days in the blazing sun, pelting rain, fiercely battling anything with wings just as scales. He was successful in his work and creativity.
As our bond grew, we did as couples do and made a home together. As I would work of the nights, he would be on adventures with his friends, and most days, gone for work when I got home from my shifts. Time progressed, and on my days off, he developed more shenanigans, decreasing out time together. But, hey, busy people, right?

   I got back into school, because who doesn't enjoy the torment of earning a degree?
The plauge took hold at the tiny hospital, and for everyone unaffected, the world came to a hault. But for those of us elbow deep in it, there was anything but placid waters ahead.
The clients were no longer predictable stomach aelments and gnarly wound dressings. The standard chest pain complaints were no longer a routine run of tests and drug admistrations. People. Were . Dying.
No matter what we did, how many machines we hooked to them, how strong the drugs were, or how fast we were giving them. Clients were dropping faster than dominos. And my team and I were descending from cynical, but still compassionate and enthusiastic nurses to defeated, heartbroken, still compassionate, but gun shy, no less.
       It became more difficult to separate work trauma and turmoil from home turmoil. As a result, I was rapidly becoming a bitter person in my relationship. This drove Oliver from me. Of the nights I was home, he was gone more and more frequently. I wasn't sleeping. Nightmares that lingered for days afterwards attacked me when I did sleep.
I texted Oliver one evening when I was home and asked him to come home and try to spend time with me. When he came home and immediately secluded himself in his home office, I became increasingly frustrated.
     I felt like I was on the bottom of everyone's list in my life. At work, I was at the becking call of my patients, which is to be expected. Management didn't know what to do any more than we did, so the only thing they could think to do was buy us dinner. I couldn't go near my family, for fear of carrying this enigma of a disease that had overtaken literally the entire planet. I had just started in my classes to further my degrees and I was already failing. Oliver never wanted to be with me unless he was sleeping in our bed, which seemed like it was about three nights a month. I felt as though I was juggling three plates, but the plates were on fire, and I was on roller skates. I don't know how to roller skate.
     The night Oliver was home, I burst into his office,  he looked as though he had seen a ghost. Our five bedroom house had become a place of tension and neglect, all in one. Oliver's desk was lined with invoices from clients, photos of possible client landscapes, and guitar picks that he had collected over the years. My lack of children, and his three children seemingly never impacted his view of me, but that was just another hang up in my brain; another proof of my failure.
     "Why do you hate me?" I shrieked. At this point, I think I had snapped.
     "Why do I what?" Oliver's face had lost all color, his silver eyes had shifted to a pale green, and his fists were clamped around his fountain pen as though it may possibly run away.
     "You heard me. You never speak to me. The only time you are near me is when you want to fuck me. You can't even find time to shower here anymore. Who is she?"
     "Have you lost your mind? Have you tripped acid or drank a gallon of whiskey?"
       "Oliver. Please don't play me for stupid. You're cheating on me, and lying to me about it and I don't deserve that!"
  The tears were streaming from my face. I was shaking from my hair follicles down to my ankles. I wanted answers. Any answer. I was anticipating he say he had been sleeping with a client, or racing horses... God, anything.
    " Sweetheart ", he started after what seemed like an hour. "there is no other woman. There is nothing to know, other than-" his voice broke and it was his turn to break down to tears.
Oh God. Here it goes. He's selling drugs. He's laundering money, or kidnapping small dogs and making them into purses. He's stealing pianos and repurposing the ivory of the keys...
    "I have stomach cancer. I've been undergoing radiation and chemo for the last eight months. It's to the point that I throw up blood on the regular. I've been smoking weed to try and ease everything off, but it's not enough anymore. I don't want you to get into trouble with your license, so I just avoid you. I'm in the end stage now, and it has traveled to my liver. The oncologist said that in a matter of a few weeks, it will be in every organ of my body. I've lost the war."
     Everything turned blue and I lost feeling in my whole body. I woke up to Oliver fanning me with a book and poking me in the ribs. Damn him and his ability to make me smile when I don't even know what planet I am on.
      Why hadn't I seen it? Why hadn't we talked about it? What kind of treatments was he doing? Where was he really staying when I wasn't home? Why hadn't we talked about it?
He answered these questions patiently once I came back to earth enough to comprehend what he was saying. We sat in his office and talked for hours on end. We sobbed. And sobbed. He got sick at least three times, and it all made sense. Perfect, chrystal clear sense.
He was pail. He had lost a ton of weight. His teeth were brittle, his skin was dull. His eyes were defeated.
In that night, we became closer than we were before the plauge hit, before he was diagnosed. Everything felt so normal and perfect. For the first time in months, my soul was ignited.
       Darkness outside broke into the blaze of July, and I slept. I really, dreamlessley slept. So did he.
     With work the next night, i faced another slew of fatalities, another night of losing. At this point, all of us floor nurses had coroner's phone numbers memorized, and we could smell death in a room before the client had even passed. But I could handle it a little better, because when I got home that morning, I knew my sweet Oliver would be there to hold me. The silver lining radiated.
         I pulled into my driveway, and ran up my porch steps, and floated through the door. The house was still, which I was used to. I went into our bedroom, ready to slide beneath the fleece blanket and feel his heart beat as I rested my hand on his chest.
The bed was empty, as was the master bath. I showered and changed into shorts and a tank top, and went hunting for my honey. His office was strangely vacant. So I navigated to one of the rooms we used to store his paintings he did before we got together. Still no sign of him. I walked into my "library" which was a tornado of medical books. I scanned the room, and in the far left corner, he sat in the floor, slumped over. His out stretched legs tilted in opposite directions. His hands were resting on either side of him, stained with the blood that had poured from deep gashes on both forearms. What little color he had to his skin was gone, and his formerly crimson lips were now blue and cold. He had been gone for a long while. If I were to have guessed, since about nine o'clock the night previous. What air I had in my lungs left.    
My heart hit the earth; I'm pretty sure I felt the vibration from impact. My hands tingled as though they went to sleep. I felt my head bobble and my eyes crossed. My knees turned into water, and my person dropped. The thud of my hip hitting the floor sent a familiar, but sharp pain to my knee, then up to my hip. My brain broke in my head. All thought stopped. Everything except one word: no.
      As I dialed for 911 (damn cell phones are everywhere these days), my voice dropped to a whisper attempting to explain the situation.
      "I'm sorry, ma'am, what did you say the male had done?" Dispatch was listening as loud as they could, but my air was still not readily available in the half hour it took me to pull myself together.
     "He's c-c-c-cut-t-t-t-t his w-r-r-r-rists-s-s-s". The  chills took me over and I could feel the crackers I had for lunch fighting up my throat. I was sitting beside him, his blood in a ten foot radius on the floor, and when I realized I was slumped over too, sitting up triggered the urge to projectile vomit, so I turned the other way.
     "Whut was aaaaat?" dispatch asked from my speaker. "Ma'am, is the man still aliiiive?" she asked, calm and drawn out.
       "No. He's gone". I finally spat out.

     The months came to pass in a whirlwind of heartache after heartache. His funeral was in one of the fifty churches in town. His parents didn't show up, but his brothers did. As did both of my brothers, who both vowed to keep me grounded.
     Two am phone calls, random trips to do anything from shopping (those guys are the best) to aquariums; anything to keep my mind off of Oliver. So when I called Donovan to come sit with me a while, and his best idea was to shoot a game of pool.
     The table Oliver and I bought was light oak, with a
Plum felt that topped a perfect slate top. Why he wanted plum, I'll never know. But we shared a love for that table that was comparable to that of a horse and human relationship.
       It was October. Oliver hated October. I have always loved it. So cliche, I know. It was nearing the end of the month, so it was getting darker out faster.
   "Well", Donovan started. He was ready to go home to his house full of love and life. "come up, sleep at my place. We'll watch movies and drink til one of us laughs too hard and wakes the kids up".
This sounded kindof nice. Really it did. But I needed to be alone.
      It was around eight pm when I looked at the clock last. I got in the car we loved so much, that we took so many road trips in. I could still smell him sitting beside me. I blasted the radio, and for whatever reason, I pulled out of my driveway and turned onto the highway. I could feel the speed climbing. 55...65...75...85...95...110. The govner would kick on at 140.
As the chorus of our song played the second time, I jerked the wheel to the left.
And it finally all stopped.