the loving-13

they don't stop for coffee anymore. charlie mack and his pig bellied wife suddenly took up dancing. harper and his sag faced pancake chested bitch of a wife decided the day was for golfing or pottery. susan the brown haired dike would love to come by but is just so busy with her new grandchild. all of them once would come everyday, now gone. at first i believed in their schedules but now, now i know they don't want to risk catching what debra's got. there is an anger in me that boils, that burns that causes me to pace and curse under my breath while i watch my wife try to hide her tear when drinking midmorning coffee alone.

we were all young once, but now the storm of time has rubbed away those fresh tight faces and bodies. eyes droop, hair begins to frizz and once hourglass shapes or v-shapes now become boxes and pears. there is mrs. mack, the former highschool princess, the former ms. beautiful from the college campus and a veritable calender babe as a young mother now all slop. her face over blushed, over blue eye makeup, belly over sweat pant. the bane of the elderly class, when our pants lose buttons and zippers to elastic and wool.

there are pictures of us at the big booth from mr. wangs when we were something. everybody smiling, hair combed black and white excellence. we stopped meeting there when the picture became a symbol to be cursed, avoided a embarrassing testament to how the mighty have fallen. when you were young and could use the money, had the energy to eat out to explore foreign shores and dance with your love atop the bridges of paris you had none. when you are old and could use the energy, the tender blanched skin of excitement rushing about saying 'who, what, no go go go!' you have none.

so we gone from the heart of this town. gone from whirlwinding about, celebrating our love, friendship and the milestones of our children to sitting alone in deep leather chairs contemplating history while our wives stare out the window and slowly go mad. so we go from learning about new things, new favorite authors and musicians to silence. i can't remember the last time i turned on the radio to hear something other than weather or news.

i watch debra. we have slowly stopped talking. there is the quick catch up after a phone call but mostly we are in our preferred sections of the house until a prescription or fridge needs to be replenished.

while there were newspapers for awhile, then losing out to television then losing out to television and the computer then losing out to chat sites. i make profiles while she yodels about the birds. i make sexual innuendos that i could no longer follow through on. i ask for, and receive, dirty pictures or head shots and i try to dream all the life i had into their eyes. i think of the sadness of being alone of being married for so long only to end up back where you started and that sex drive replaced with a conversation or company drive and so you go searching.

i get long emails from some woman named carol who lives in arizona and always votes republican. she tells me of her children and their 'hassels' how her son is a 'good boy but mostly lazy' and that she 'lost her charlie a few years ago to the cancer.' i tell her of my problems and ask for a picture.

carol, who lives in arizona, sends me a set of pictures. the first is of her face and then they slowly pull back to reveal her naked and twisted about her sheets like an old marylin monroe picture. her body is loose in the stomach, breasts and butt from life not gluttony. the curse of genetics. i don't answer her letters for a week then guilt ridden i respond explaining away my absence with an excuse of a child emergency.

tabitha was a big black forty year old with four children and no husband. she talks of poverty and how hard it is to raise four kids on her income. tabitha has to decide between rent and child insurance. her ex is a 'real broke son of a bitch who don't do shit for these kids' and her own parents are 'broke too, so there ain't no real help down here.' she is from idaho and works as a checker at the local grocery. they qualify for state aid but need 'some cash to help pay the lawyer for to get the insurance. it is all fucked up, excuse my language.' i send a thousand dollars and never answer another of her emails.

debra was the one who picked charlene. charlene who lives in our town. charlene has auburn hair and is twenty years my junior. it was debra who wrote back who explained, 'my wife she is dying of alzheimers.' charlene who has a husband who is also sick wrote back. debra was the one who responded, 'life is hard when you get old trusting something only to be lied to. you love and you love and in the end it feels like a cheat, like your partner failed you.' charlene was the one who wrote back, 'it is a cheat. you work to build to provide and your family is provided, is grown and secure. you work so that you can take these days to travel, to enjoy each other then this. doesn't matter. all it is, doesn't matter. shit, you love and pray try to do good things and still it comes, still they are taken away.'

debra was the one who sent the picture. charlene was the one who responded with a picture. the effort together they are building together, a relationship. it was me who discovered all this and said nothing. we never spoke about what was going on. it was debra and jack who slowly faded and it was charlene and i who spent the suffering together, over email then telephone then coffee then dinners.

we attended two funerals together. we suffered the violence of emotion from the mouths of our children. we suffered the fading and death of our loves of our partners. it was the sick beds and graveyards that built all this. it was the pain and loneliness that built all this. there are just some things so heavy you can't lift alone.

there was funerals. there was flowers and time then dinners and slow dances. there was the violence and the passage of time. there are the memories and the memories to come. there was the dating and the passage of time. there was the friendship that grows with the passage of time. there was the wedding. finally there was somethings that we could not quite identify as true love, true joy or true hope but it has to do.