You don’t scream

Cry out for help

Swing a punch

Try to get away

Call it by name

Is this what you think you deserve

Is this what you want

How can you let it

Tear your children into pieces

How can you not care

We have held on

For so many years

Pulled with all our might

We can not

Do this anymore

Too many lies

Too much darkness

Too much cold

We offered sunlight, you didn’t want it

We offered a path, you didn’t walk it

We can’t solve this

We can’t fix this

Only you can

And you won’t

So we must

We need to

Let go of the rope

The concrete was slippery. The night rain had frozen to the sidewalks. A thin invisible coating that made people walk slow and duck-like, waddling across their driveways to free their vehicles from similar icy shells. Tree branches looked like they were made of glass. The air so sharp that it scratched its way to your lungs. The stoplights had stopped working, wires too cold to carry a signal. The birds were gone. The digital display on the clock by the bedside table had gone dark. The cold radiated from the walls. Somewhere in the back of Stacy’s mind, the feeling had began to form; slowly push its way to front of her thoughts. The recognition of the blanket pulled high and tight around her. The feeling of goosebumps sprouting all over her skin. The silent void of appliance motors no longer running. Soon she will wake. Stare at her breath that hangs frozen in the air. Her brain will scramble to put the pieces together. She will reach for her husband. Push on his cold arm. “Roy” she will say, “Roy, wake up” . “No, yeah, was I snoring? I’ll sleep on the couch”. “Roy!”What?!? Fuck its cold in here!”

There are days when I don’t know what to ask. When I don’t know what you did? Where you went? Who you were with? If you found joy? If you learnt something? If you cussed someone out? If someone cussed you out?

And I know that you and I only have a few minutes together, standing barefoot on the cracked kitchen tiles. Fault lines spreading like a web of dead veins. The clock on the stove almost declaring a new day. You scour the fridge; scarf down yogurt, tonight’s leftover pizza, this mornings pancakes or yesterday’s chicken fingers. And then you’re gone again. Downstairs for a midnight shower.

Are you ok, his wife asks, watching him feel the contours if his face, what are you doing. Nothing, he says, nothing. The tips of his fingers press against one side of his upper jaw, then the other, seeking abnormalities, imbalances, signs. None today though. Not now. Not yet. The stubble, she asks, is that it? When did you shave last anyway? I don’t actually know, he says. So not it’s not the stubble, she said. No, it’s, you know, I am just checking. Checking for what? What are you checking for? He wishes he could tell her. He wishes he had a way to make her understand. But her brain doesn’t work like that. He knows she has never done it. He knows she probably never will. He has known that for a long time. Possibly from the second he met her. I’m just making sure everything is all right. Oh my god, seriously?!? What do you mean? You’re not fucking dying! You and my sister, the two of you, Jesus! It’s good to, you know, be safe. Please go somewhere else. And he does. He always does. He rounds the corner to the kitchen. Now all the way out of sight. He presses his his index finger against his right upper jaw, then his left, just to be sure.

He had always enjoyed the rain. The cool drops sliding over his freshly shaven skull, The wetness on the back of his neck. He would walk for hours at night. Silently staring into the lit up houses trying to imagine what it would feel like to live in the rooms he saw.

The rooms with burning candles and the rooms with multicolored Tiffany lamps and the rooms with plants and the rooms with giant framed paintings on the walls and the rooms with bunk beds and the rooms with fish tanks. And if he did live there, would he have a wife, kids, a dog? Would he get to know neighbours on the street? Would he have them over for roast chicken, a slice of key lime pie? Would there be conversation over the back fence line or cold beer on the cobblestone patio? Maybe, just maybe, should his neighbours be older, perhaps they would need help shoveling snow off their driveway? Would he offer to run something to the dump the next time he was going; something the garbage men don’t take. Would he gather mail and feed the cat when his neighbors were out of town? Would he watch the arborists for 3 days as they cut down the magestic Norwegian oak in his neighbours yard that was full of hollows.

Would he would fight with his neighbour over the small patch of grass between their houses that he would damage waterproofing to his basement? Would his neighbor be an angry, cold-hearted octogenarian. Would the relationship devolve to the point of all communication ceased, except when they would tell each other to go fuck themself?

He tried to tell her. Just this one thing. It seemed so simple, so unrefined. It should have been so easy to say. He tried to tell her when she stirred eggs in the frying pan, a tumult of yolks and whites, the small flicks of her her skinny wrists, the eagerness to not let any stick to the side of the pan, as if that, a sign of imperfect, of letting color slip outside the lines, of breaking the unwritten rules of lady hood.

He tried to tell her as they walked, falling a half step behind, mouthing the words into the sharp Winter air that slaps his face red, that etches proof of him into the cold, a breath cloud, a temporary fossil that lingers for only the briefest of moments beneath his nose, a frozen record that he was here, that he mattered.

He tried to tell her as her feet stood still on the sidewalk, look she whispered, the cardinal hopping here and there, a twitch, a flutter, eating something from the surface of the dry snow. Bright red, startling as droplet of fresh blood. And, then off, flying over the branches encased in ice, the frozen puddles, the heaps of shoveled snow at the ends of driveways, searching for warmth, searching for safety. Searching for home.