12 month lease 18 months later

Tonight, I will sign the lease for our new apartment.

It feels weird to say "our" because I always envisioned this as my great Seattle adventure. Now it is shared, and that's okay (much less lonely anyway), but I'm not quite sure where the lines are. We wake up and go to work together and come home together and until this weekend (hopefully), we have been sleeping in the same bed. I thought I wouldn't like it. I thought I would get frustrated and miss my own space. Instead I find that I do not want to be alone.



I wrote the date at the top of the page, "FEBRUARY 27". Twenty-seven. Today is the twenty-seventh of the month. Today is another full, numerical month farther. It didn't take long to count. Eighteen months since August 27th 2011. Eighteen months. The amount of time it would take for a baby to be conceived, born, and be nine months old. The amount of time--outside of mother's who won't admit their babies are over a year old and say, "18 months"--known as a year-and-a-half. The amount of time that separates my sister and me in age. The amount of time it has taken for me to get to here from August 27th 2011.

I am 2,587 miles away from the place I grew up. I am 2,587 miles away from the place that he died. I am 2,587 miles away from the person I thought I was 18 months ago. I am 2,587 miles away from Derek.



Sharing a bed is hard, even when it is a full-size. I rolled over the other night, letting my foot slide to the right. It touched Laura's, and she instantly pulled hers away. I moved closer to the edge of the bed, careful to keep my distance.



"Nat," he looked at me with a small, closed-mouth smile, "Come lay with me."

I walked up to the bed. First, I had to move him over. I walked around to the other side and pulled the sleeping pad towards me in a swift tug. His head stayed where it was, and he uncomfortably dealt with the disposition until I could pull the pillow towards me too. He was much to far on his side, so I pulled one of the extra pillows from behind his back. I sat it next to his head pillow so that I would have one too. It was still warm from him laying on it. I went back to his right side and nudged my wide hips between the bed sides and his hips, sometimes nudging him a little farther.

"Nat! Nat! My leg!" He gave a slight panic as his leg started slipping. I pulled it back onto the bed more and continued to settle into the bed.

"Hold my hand." The first few times, I was a bit wary. It just seemed weird, no matter how close we were. I hadn't held anyone's hand in quite a while, unless you counted holding Derek's arms and fingers in the stretches for his physical therapy that we did every day that we didn't forget to.

I reached over and grabbed his right hand with my right. His fingers were cold and stiff, and in the same position they had been in for the past few years with slight exception. His fingers moved as if he were always wearing mittens--together and not very far.

He wiggled his thumb up and down half an inch. "One-two-three-four..."

"... I declare a thumb war..." Sometimes I lost on purpose. Sometimes he really did catch my thumb and pinch it down so hard that there was no escape. Strength has nothing to do with muscles.

It became a thing--when I visited, we would lay in bed and watch movies or talk or I would read to him. It was an easy adjustment. Sometimes, when Dawnna was late coming home (the year before the year of hospital rooms and breathing machines), I would lay with him after I put him to bed--keep him company until there was someone else home to be with him. Someone other than Mr.Moose, of course (with his soft fur and red, Canadian maple-leaf sweater), who, I admit, did quite a good job of comforting him during the night.

"Nat," he looked at me with that same, closed-mouth smile and eyes that always seemed tired, but I never understood just how tired, "Come lay with me."

Sometimes I was unsure  because some nurses didn't like that. Sometimes I felt ashamed, embarrassed, to be seen lying in bed with my cousin.

"You are a cute couple," one of the night nurses said, as Derek and I lay watching a movie. I looked at him and then at her. It was one of those silent nights when he had the vent and couldn't talk, so he just opened his mouth and laughed in quiet, the way Katlin and I do when we are together and laughing so hard that no sound comes out, and we sit clapping our hands like walruses.

"We aren't together," I managed between giggles.

"Oh, are you siblings? You do look quite alike. Twins?"

"May as well be," I said, smiling.



At all of the funerals that I went to growing up, I always remember my mother touching the deceased in a gentle caress--a squeeze of the hand, a light brush against the stiff cheek. Aside from my grandmother's funeral, at which I was four years old, yet I still remember nudging her and telling her to wake up, I had never touched a dead body. It frightened me, and I couldn't understand how my mother could bear to let her skin touch someone whom we loved but was no longer in that shell. How could she bear to stand so close to death?

But I held Derek's hand. From the time we arrived, I went to him. I held his hand. I held his colder, stiffer fingers until the make-up rubbed off the top, revealing a deep purple splotch. I held his hand and watched his face, waited for his eyes to twitch as if he were just dreaming, waited for him to open his face in a smile and say, "Just kidding! You really thought I was dead, didn't you?"

It was a game we played all our lives. Whenever someone walked into the room, we'd look at each other and say, "Play dead!"

Some nights, I would roll Derek over during his bed bath, and when he was facing me again, he would have his eyes closed and his tongue sticking out.

"I'n dead," he would say, tongue still sticking out.

"Uh huh."

"What if I really was dead? What would you do?"

"Go home and go to bed." It was usually around 1am by this time.

"No you wouldn't. What would you do?"

"I don't know, Derek." It wasn't something I ever wanted to think about. It wasn't something I ever thought would actually happen.

But it did. And I held his hand. And I wanted him to wake up. And I wanted him to ask me to lie next to him. And I wanted to follow him all the way to the cold rectangle of missing ground. But I didn't. I only held his hand, and when it was time to close the casket, I let go.



It was different. Different from letting go of his hand to leave for the night, to come back and visit him at the hospital the next day. Different still from letting go just to move to my chair that I slept in on slumber party nights at the hospital. And different from leaving the emergency room where his life had just left him and where the warm feeling in his blushed cheeks would begin to vacate before I even left the room.



2,785 miles sounds like a long way. Long enough to drive from Seattle to Phoenix and back again. Long enough to forget the miles in-between such that the twenty-seventh of any given month feels like the twenty-seventh of that one particular month in 2011. I hated when the year turned 2012 because it was a year that Derek would never see. I don't even know how to digest 2013.

Tonight, I will sign the lease for our new apartment.

I keep pushing it off because I can't believe that this is where I am. That I have a job that I love, that I am on good terms with my whole family, that I live in Seattle of all places (may I remind you I have never been before?!), that I am still pushing forward even though the heavy beating within says "hold back. don't go". 

My great, selfish Seattle adventure is turning into a smash-your-pride-to-pulp-and-see-what-comes-out-at-the-unforeseeable-end-of-the-journey adventure.

Sometimes it really sucks. Like these periods of not writing poems or the nights of going straight to bed after work or the days of cold, dark dampness where my basement apartment offers no warmth or comfort or the hours of confused desolation and wondering if my life in Pennsylvania ever existed,  if there really was a young man with red hair and an underbite and stiff fingers and bright green eyes who called me Nat and Monk and Kalawagachattanooga or clickclickclick or whatever pretend language we spoke for the day. (we once painted styrofoam cups blue and glued them to paper bags and pretended they were an alien life form called the "cupperstyroblues")

Sometimes it's really great. Like the prospect of moving to a new apartment, closer to my friends and to downtown to a place that is pet-friendly, leaving open the opportunity to get a dog and to finally be reunited with my Russian tortoise, Elijah, or the joy of having people that I love just a ferry ride away in a slightly more rural town where we can go hiking in woods that feel like home or the fun of wearing bright rainboots and splashing in puddles singing my invented "Rainboots" song or picking cold, wet blackberries in the bushes along Puget Sound or simply living so close to the pulsing shores of a body of salt water or in the valley between two walls of mountains I had hardly even heard of six, maybe seven, months ago.



I wish I could tell him about it. Every detail. At first, I thought I could. I would desperately write on his Facebook wall, as if he could see it. As if he would respond. But these little blurbs of memories on a blank screen with a flashing text line will have to do because surely I cannot always hold it all in my head.


I'm signing on to a twelve-month lease. Eighteen months ago, I couldn't imagine where I would be in twelve months. And I've jumped around a lot. I'm about to sign on for twelve months. A whole-nother year just like the last. Except entirely different.