Almost lost - Diary Entry
In fragments I remember the boy who laughed at his fathers jokes even the bad ones especially the bad ones who believed eighteen meant invincible who never checked the time when saying goodbye and who disappeared before he knew what goodbye really meant.
In pieces I discover the way I still make terrible puns when she is cooking and watch her roll her eyes the same way my mother used to and something ancient and familiar rises up inside me.
Some Tuesday evening she finds me staring at photo albums like they are archaeological sites and asks who I am looking for and I want to say myself the version that existed before I learned that ordinary mornings can become last mornings but instead I say just remembering and she knows what I mean.
The man I thought I would become was confident unafraid of attachments someone who made plans beyond next week someone who believed in forever and did not calculate loss inside every I love you and that man vanished somewhere around two thousand nine.
The man I am is cautious grateful for small things someone who says drive safe and means it with his whole nervous system someone who loves like every day might be the last because sometimes it is.
She watches me sort through the ruins of who I was with the patience of someone studying artifacts never asking why I keep old ticket stubs from movies we saw before everything changed never commenting when I wake from dreams where I am still running toward something instead of away from it.
What remains is the way I eat ice cream straight from the container when no one is looking the way I remember every birthday every small celebration because what if and the instinct that makes me text her when she is late not from distrust but because I know how fast late can become never.
Some nights she curls against me and I feel the weight of her acceptance that this careful grateful sometimes broken man is the husband she chose not the boy he was and not the man he might have been.
We never have the conversation about all the parts of me she cannot reach or the parts buried too deep but we live it every day in the way she loves what she can touch and in the way I let her.
In the wreckage I have found compassion deeper than the boy ever had gratitude sharp but clear and the ability to sit with pain without needing to fix it and a love that tastes more like remembering than expecting.
She did not ask for the boy from before she married the man who rose from that boys ashes older wiser tender in strange ways and fierce about protecting what remains.
The truth is I am not the person I was becoming but I am not lost I am changed rebuilt from what was left still recognizably human still capable of love still here.
Each evening she falls asleep first and I listen to her breathe and count the ways she loves my reconstruction and maybe the point was never finding the boy or becoming the man I planned to be maybe the point is learning to love the man I became and she already does.
Tomorrow I will practice seeing myself through her eyes fragment by fragment until I am whole enough to recognize.