Waiting For You

I’ve put her on one side, the half of me that waits for you. I ignore her lagging behind like a reluctant puppy on a damp walk. I blank out her cries of “he said he’d be here” every time we hit a crisis. I am immune to the way she looks at me as if I can change things. I’ve stopped trying to explain what's happened to her because there isn’t a good enough explanation.

I think I’m doing pretty well. The healthy half of me knows it wasn’t my fault. It doesn’t try and remodel my raw materials into something more worthy. It studiously avoids the quicksand of memory. I’m on this path now and I have no choice but to keep going. I’m even beginning to think about other endings.

The waiting half isn’t much fun. She bleats on like that goat in Jurassic Park, staked out for the dinosaur. It’s pathetic the way it brings harm on itself staying in that surreal world. The world where the blue strobes cut the black sky into before and after. The one where I opened the door and normality got sucked out into the policeman’s mouth. What he said swallowed my life like a black hole.

I don’t dwell on that. I tell myself I’m lucky you’re alive, it could have been worse. But hard as I try, some days I can’t believe that. I watch you inhabiting my husband’s body and I know I’m living in a zombie film. Ironically it’s worse when you impersonate him. Like just now when you laughed at your new carer spilling your food. She’s mortified but you laugh again and again until she finally smiles. I think of how you would have handled that before, gently teasing her until it felt like nothing. But before no one would have had to feed you.

The waiting half over-powers me. She says you laughing is your first toddler steps to empathy. She actually thinks you’re going to come all the way back to us. You just got lost inside in the crash so all we have to do is wait for you to resurface. She’s wrong, of course, the self-help books state how important it is to accept you as you are now. To love you today not for who you used to be but I can’t do that, neither of my halves can. We fell in love with a giant and we’re living with a sweet runt.

She kids herself and I hate myself for being so hard, for knowing there is no better future. I think you either get a long time with someone small or a short time with someone as king-sized as you. Another silly belief. Perhaps I should divide myself up into hundreds of notions like balls of mercury running across the floor after the barometer shattered. Maybe one of them will contain a way of dealing with this, a belief to make life bearable.

You are, and you aren’t, you. More than half of you died in the accident. The sensible thing to do is to walk away from your remains but she won’t stop waiting for you. You weren’t the only one torn in two.