At first sight you were smiling there, a certain gleam in your eyes as we sat in the sports bar with our friends and bet on the Colts or the Giants. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the situation, and perhaps not, but all of the sudden we were seeing each other week nights and Saturday afternoons before I even knew what I was getting into. I would hold your hand and you would hold mine, regardless of empty meaning or painted feelings, like graffiti on train cars- the kind that wasn’t really supposed to be there but looked cool when the train whirled past. And it felt good.
Once, we were sitting on a park bench and you were reading The Times and I was feeding remnants of my sandwich to the fish in the pond. You were on the page that said ‘Death by lasagna’ remarking about the critic’s love for ‘truth’- which you said with sarcasm. A little boy whirled by on his bike and crashed into a tree. You threw your paper down and ran to help him. And when you came back, looking relieved that he was okay, I thrust my hands into yours and looked into your eyes. You squeezed my hand and for the first time, I squeezed back. And it felt good.
When it was the first time in the endings of my seeing you, I caressed the side of your face and a certain feeling of numbness ran through me. It was a lukewarm kind of feeling that only you and I could know. It surged through my veins and and even from across the room I could feel the warmth of you, even though you were sleeping. My hands intertwined with yours and the roughness of you palms somehow complimented the softness of mine. Your face shone coolly in the light streaming through the window and your mouth lay slightly open as if looking for something to wash down my last token of love.
The first time we fought, I cried. You sipped on your flask and contained me in your arms and told me it would be alright and that you were sorry you said those mean things, and I reluctantly said I was sorry about getting so upset. Believe me when I say I was sorry, but trust in me even more when I say that it was not for getting upset. Perhaps you thought so, but I never said what we argued about was stupid.
The last night we were together, I was making lasagna. You came in and wanted to impress me after a fight. “I love you,” you said. I said something along the lines of ‘I love you too’ in response, making me think of the first time we held hands for real, held hands with meaning, and held hands without it being like a thin sheet of paint over a transparent wall we both wished was brick.

The last time we held hands, you were already gone. As wrong as it was for how you died, I held your hand for the entire viewing, and let the roughness of your palm, the wrinkles in your skin from your constant grasp on ‘life’, comfort me in your death. But even then, through the roughness of your dead, lifeless hands, I could feel a certain sense of warmth, like you knew I was sorry.

Later I would come to realize what it was like, how it had always been. All along, it had never been like a painted sheet of glass, but more like I was standing on a burner. Ripping agony, but then after all the lasting hurt, my toes started to go numb. And pretty soon, I couldn’t feel my feet and I was only mildly aware of the tingling sensation in the limbs on the lower half of my body. They said you died from a heart attack, and I said I didn’t find you dead until days afterwards. I thought at second glance you were sleeping, your mouth slightly open as if looking for something to wash down my last token of love. The expression on your face at first told me you were having another nightmare- probably from a concoction of alcohol and your wife’s dreadful imagination. I crept up and held your hand, vaguely aware of something that I didn’t want to think about, something like a tingle in my feet even though it was my own fault for standing on the burner.

My therapist tells me now that after something bad happens, people sometimes lock the thought out of their mind so that they don’t have to think about it. He called it denial. I called it delusion. I don’t have that. You see, when you died, I locked it out, but it wasn’t a bad thing that I locked out, it was a guilty substance that I buried in the dirt behind our house, and wished in remorse to forget about, because maybe you would still be here, if it had not been in my hands.

But I miss you so much.

Miss the burner and wish it would numb me again.