Numbers

I can’t make the words in my head today; visibility is low. Barely able to see my hands form the feelings into words on the screen.
Twine. That’s what I need. If I grab an end and spin it’ll hold me together. Like an Easter ham.

I’m wearing a butt bow broader than my shoulders, a veil I hot-glued into something only a circus elephant should’ve worn, and we’re dancing to that song John Cusack held over his head because, unlike my first fiancé, my second fiancé-now-husband didn’t take me to a Kubrick movie on our first date. It’s Halloween weekend 1994, in a college town. I love fall, and Halloween, and him.

We started building this thing one night in 1989. I swallowed. He called back. First time for everything, right? And that’s how our love story started—me in acid-washed shorts and him in some day-glo tank top his mom bought him.

We put down the foundation, framed the walls, built the roof, and fixed the place up just how we liked it—we made sure it was our house. It was the house the two of us imagined. And just when we got that final room painted…cancer started punching holes in the fucking walls.

We couldn’t spackle fast enough.

It’s been twenty-four and a half years since we started building “us,” nineteen since the butt bow and glue-gunned veil better suited for a circus elephant, and three and a half since it all crumbled to the ground.

Counting was more fun when I ate oatmeal in front of Sesame Street.