My greatest love, my greatest weakness

My phone rang in the other room and, hallelujah! It was Tom calling. My world brightened. I instantly shrugged off every saturnine feeling. It occurred to me that it wasn't the over-sized sweatshirt that hung so heavily around my shoulders, making me feel listless on a sunny afternoon; It had been his absence that was weighing me down. I would experience wholeness for a few seconds, maybe minutes. He was calling me.
And his message was: "Come outside." He was here.

A 24-foot truck was idling across the street. He was leaving soon; this was only a momentary lapse in reality. But I would hang on to it, hang on to him as I would an exquisite feeling in the dissolution of a good dream. I would defy logic and evidence and history. I would try. He would leave, but not for my lack of trying. He would literally slip through my fingers again but I would hold on to the memory. Until that memory faded and became just an idea. And then, though I'd think better of it, that idea would consume a part of me.

Now I'm sitting here eating dry cereal one flake at a time. There is no milk. My energy and attention are gone, I guess that they have retreated to that part of me that meditates on impossibilities. Maybe I can get them out or maybe that part of me has expanded into something like a blackhole and my allotted usefulness for now has become irretrievable.

I watched Tom climb into his truck and drive away. I savored the moment. In a little over a week he will do this for the last time and I will most likely not be there to see it. I liked seeing him do this. He looked powerful and capable, and he is. He doesn't show the lack of rest or lack of life. He retains his poise while I fall apart. "You poor girl," he said as he held me last night, as I sobbed into his chest for missing him.
When everything is emotion joy and sorrow are right beside one another and sometimes I don't know which it is I'm feeling, and both are searing and overwhelming. And then there is now, when I've laid aside Tom's sweatshirt and the weight is still there and I know that I am languishing but I keep eating one flake at a time, typing one word at a time, counting down the seconds.