Time Stands Still

I would have laughed at the irony if I hadn’t been so afraid, terrified by the sudden possibility of our story ending. I was baking fish sticks when your sister called to tell me what happened. Summer Saturday nights were a treat after radiology rotation; there were lavender scented candles and lovey-dovey playlists, and old denim, and your shirts, and fruity drinks on your star studded patio. The long insanity of the work week seemed to fade away, the depressing feel of wrinkled scrubs, and loud pagers, and mundane paper work all almost forgotten. I had music and finger food, and invariably you; with your goofy house shoes and miserable plants and your guitar. Your apartment terribly masculine, many grays and blacks and steel, and yet on the mantel by the childhood picture you wouldn’t let me see for the longest time, a yellow and green water gun sat waiting. Waiting for you to return, and in one smooth move fill it and possibly piss me off when you wet my hair again. We waited me and the water gun. Until the phone rang, with the explanation for the delay in a shaken voice on the other side. Your Chrysler was totaled by an eighteen wheeler, sending you to ICU. Leaving me with the song you left on repeat, still on repeat. Musicsoulchild’s ‘Don’t Change’, a warm ballad about the permanence you wanted, about stability, and perhaps forever? How could I still believe in forever with everything so fragile and breakable? Now in retrospect I can see that the writing always is on the wall. We have this moment, here and now-but forever, we can only hope for, sometimes through the dark alleys we grope for light, for some chance that maybe dreams will come true; and love will stay alive. That despite all the walls into which we continue to collide somehow we will come out intact, our bruises healed with time, leaving beautiful scars where wounds once were the only marker of the roads we had walked. I sat with you that night and you never once moved, and finally I understood why when you hug me time stands still.