Heart and Soul

How are you doing? How do you feel? People mean well. They really do. They aren’t meaning to put their finger in your wounds. I never knew what to say back. I just always tried to answer without crying. But when writing, I can cry, though sometimes tears smear the ink. That’s why I wrote this in this way. Put it on a blog. So the words wouldn’t ever be lost. The note, they’d call it drearily. Who would even keep it? Who would even bother to read it?

How do I feel? I feel like my soul left me and it isn’t coming back. Like it got up and left when I slept, only I don’t sleep but for an hour or two, here and there, when I am so exhausted I can’t help it. On the bus to work. In the cafeteria. I don’t eat but for when I go to dinner with someone with hopes they can save something in me, someone who expects me to eat with them and pick up the check. I feel like my heart blew up inside my chest, or that my soul took it with him. Stole it from me when he snuck out. Put it in his pocket. I drink every night because I feel less like that, and because alcohol is some kind of temporary soul until you piss it out.

But sitting alone at a bar staring back at myself in the mirror glass between the liquor bottles isn’t where I want to be. It was never where I wanted to be. There are people here, but they don’t really exist. They laugh and smile and tell jokes and stories like regular people. And sometimes I smile, too, but there isn’t anything in it. They pass by and sometimes I think I am already dead and they are ghosts. And we are all ghosts. And at any moment someone will walk into the bar and tell me what to do next. They will give me further instructions because this certainly cannot be everything. And I wonder if I will see anyone I know. If they are waiting somewhere. This is neither Heaven or Hell. It is just a place. It is nowhere.

I miss her like hell. I said everything I didn’t mean and nothing that I did. And then I became the monster. Something dark and scary that once seen could not be seen differently. Could not ever be forgiven. And she said cruel and dark things as well. And friends said move on and find someone who loves you like you deserve to be loved, but that was a glass with a hole in it. And glasses with holes don’t hold any booze. And my mind left me before my soul, went to someone else, someplace else. I miss her boy. I miss playing on the carpet and wrestling. I miss his laugh and his smile and his excitement to see me come over. His face in the door. I miss her telling me he loves me and the rare occasion when he said it, too. I wonder if I will ever see him again. If I should write him a note, write them all a note. What would I say? Thanks for everything. Life was just all too much without you. That is what I am saying now. Post mortem. I wonder if he misses me. If I had stayed, kept my space, I might have seen him someday in passing. But after a year or so he wouldn’t have remembered me. And what would I have said then?

I miss her. The good person inside her I thought I knew to be greater than the evil. The person I loved. That which she inherited from her father over that which she was stricken with from her narcissistic mother. I don’t miss the evil, the cruelty. The cutting words out of nowhere. The person that brought out in me someone I didn’t ever want to be. A person I couldn’t live with. Someone that made my soul numb and my mind shutdown. That made my heart burst and my body hollow. But God, do I miss the good inside of her. That which I hoped would take over her entire soul.

What am I? Alive, but in a paradoxical state? Maybe this is purgatory. That which I read about which I thought the Catholics created for money. This pub. I rub my head and there is a hole in it. On the right temple. I can put my finger in it to the knuckle and wiggle it around. But I am clean and I don’t feel anything. But then in another instance, there is no hole, but there is tremendous sorrow. So much goddamn sorrow that I cannot purge it from myself by sticking the same finger down my throat, which I have done twice futilely hoping to get rid of the sick feeling in my stomach, the pain in my broken heart as to where she is now and with whom. And to erase those memories of her son, though I keep looking at pictures, watching videos, torturing myself.

It doesn’t make sense here, but I drink and wait for the door to open and for whoever it is to come in and to explain to me what is happening. The guy next to me bought me a beer and abruptly said he “met his” after he lost everything to drugs and hookers. The bartender heard him and said she lost her life in a bathtub when her boyfriend left her for her best friend. And to top them both, the slicked-hair barback with the tattoos said he gave up the ghost when his daughter died of cancer. He had hoped to join her. And then they looked at me and the hole was there again and I said my wife left me and aborted our child, and it was as it was, no sense repeating it now, and it happened on the mountain because I wanted to be closer to God and my boy. That’s all.

They looked at me so pitifully that I looked down at my feet and bit my lip. My head hurt and I grabbed the glass and took a long drink. Lonely Teardrops played. Jackie Wilson. “You’ll like it here,” the pretty bartender promised. “You don’t feel anything. You don’t miss anyone. And you never have to leave. Someone will come in for you, but you certainly don’t have to go with him or her. They will try to talk you into it, but you don’t have to go anywhere.”

“When will they come?”

“Soon,” she said.

“Where do they want me to go?”

“Here or there.”

“Where am I now?”

“Nowhere,” she smiled. “For the first time in your life. You are absolutely nowhere.”

“Why do I still hurt?”

“You can feel?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. I guess it is probably because it is so fresh. After a while, you won’t feel it. You can be happy here, get angry, but no one feels what they felt to get here.” She smiled a sympathetic smile and said I could stay at her place when they closed up if I wanted to. There is an extra room and books, she offered. She said she only makes pancakes when someone stays over and she loves pancakes. I thanked her, but said I would just go home. I was only a block away. She shook her head.

I scrolled through my phone and looked at pictures I meant to delete. But I never had the heart to delete them. It was like cutting a part out of me. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye in that way. Only in this way. Only because I mucked everything up so badly the people I loved most thought I was horrible and irredeemable. The things I said and did to lose everything. But I wasn’t horrible. People sometimes lose themselves when they lose everything they love, so my pastor says.

I was drinking my fourth beer when the door opened. My beautiful wife walked in and sat down next to me. She smiled like she once did when we first met, or every time I told a bad joke. Her eyes sparkled in the bar light and her lips were red and full.

“You can come with me,” she said softly. “Everything will be fine. It will be how it was. I love you, stupid.” The bar got quiet and although everyone glanced over, they looked away. They seemed afraid in a way I cannot explain. I stared at my wife. My God, she was so beautiful. I wanted to touch her, but I found myself unable to move my arms to do so. “Come on with me,” she repeated. “Just out that door. We can walk to my place like we once did from here, drunk on pickle-juice vodka.”

“Your place?” I asked.

“Yes,” she smiled biting her lip. “Come. Remember the emojis? The donut and the baguette. The tongue and the peach. All of that. Come! I love you. Heart and soul.”

I’ve never wanted her more badly than then. She stood up and walked away. She was wearing knee high boots and jeans. Her long legs made smooth strides towards the door. She looked back over her shoulder and I was suddenly able to move again, woken from my shock. But still, I didn’t move.

“Come,” she said again. I desperately wanted to go, to be with her again. To see her boy. To lay with her, to sleep with her, to make love to her. To feel all that I felt with her again. All that was warm and wet, cold and hot, and all that was perfect and peaceful, when there was nothing but the sound of her breathing and my arm around her. But I remained affixed to the stool. She looked disappointed as she opened the door. She cried as she left. But still there I was in the barstool.

 

The guy next to me patted me on the back. He said he didn’t think I was going to make it. The bartender smiled and told me congratulations. And I asked for what and she said for not going with her. “That wasn’t your wife,” she explained plainly. “That was a demon. And had you gone, you would have been in Hell. He comes in the form of what we all want most. Many have gone. Those you see here, haven’t.”

“But how do you know she was a demon?”

“There is a window,” a drunk guy blurted. “We watched what happened to some of the others. Once you go through that door with them, they turn back and carry you off. Big wings and fangs and these black claws. It’s a horrific sight.”

“What happens now?” I asked taking another drink. I was still anxious from seeing her again. My broken heart was temporarily bandaged and beating like a drum as though she was still in the room.

“Nothing. We just drink here and go home and come back and go home and come back. There is no such thing as time. And you are absolved of all your sorrows.”

“There is nothing else?”

The bartender looked at a few of the patrons and then back at me. “There is something. A few have received another visitor. A second visitor.”

“And?”

“Well, that one takes you someplace else. But,” she shook her head. “Don’t get your hopes up. There’s only been a few I’ve seen.”

“I’ve seen two others,” another man said.

“Someplace else?” I repeated.

“Yeah. Someplace. But for now you’re nowhere. I have records at home. The Beatles. Hendrix. You sure you don’t want to join me?”

“I’m not sure of anything.”

 

That night I walked home. The house was empty and dark as it was when I first bought it. I switched on the light and laid in bed and looked at pictures on my phone I should have deleted long ago. The pictures I was looking at on top of the mountain. I remembered what I did that night. It was a dreary Thursday. January. I got off work and met with my pastor at 7. I asked him if I killed myself where would I go. What would happen to me. And he scratched his head and told me about Hell and the “cold reality of it,” which I thought was odd that he said cold. He didn’t say I would go to Hell, but he strongly discouraged it. He said that I should go to the hospital and check myself in and they would help me. He said hospitals and doctors and pills are put on Earth by God to help people, and I asked if the same was true for abortion doctors, heroin, murderers, and rapists, without trying to sound disrespectful, but he smiled it off and said the Devil does his own putting, too. And when I asked how he knows who put who and where they put them, he said you just know. Not everything can be explained.

I went home and went to the bar and got a little drunk. Then I left the bar and went to the mountain and on the mountain I sat there and looked out across the city and wondered how she was, and how he was, and how the baby was, or if he was. And I thought the baby might need a dad somewhere and I wanted to be a dad more than the world. I had been a dad, but I failed at it. This baby was my last chance. And I scratched my head and thought of all the writers who had gone before and I laid down, though it was cold and wet, and the wind whipped over my face and body like dark spirits preparing me for my fate. I looked up in the dark and saw nothing for the first time. No stars, no clouds, no moon. Just blackness. Just an empty womb that had everything ripped from it. And I cried. And nothing the pastor said, or anyone said, could do anything for me then. I sat up and gathered my nerve. I heard it crack in a split-second and my head slouched and I fell back, and still, above me there was absolutely nothing.

 

Time doesn’t exist in nowhere. The pain dulled and the bartender was right, eventually I couldn’t feel what brought me here. I didn’t torture myself in how I reacted when my wife told me it was a joke of a marriage and she didn’t want me or the baby. I didn’t think of it at all. Maybe my soul had wandered back in and slipped inside of me as I slept one night, soundly in my cold bed. And my mind must have regenerated from that which was left when it forsook me after my heart broke. The way a plant regrows from just a fragment of the root. Maybe, a lot of things. But there I sat in that pub and drank with all the regulars and occasionally a new person. A few men and several women, who would come in and look a lot like I did, what I remember from the mirror glass between the liquor bottles. Sometimes they would sit there and ask the bartender why they were here and it would come out exactly why we all were here. And then someone would come in and sit next to them and whisper in their ear and almost always they would smile and go. And there was nothing I could say or do to stop them. There was nothing anyone could say or do because we couldn’t move or speak. Others would look out the window and watch the visitor turn into that winged-demon and pick the naïve one up and carry them off to Hell. But I never watched. I never wanted to see it.

Time doesn’t exist here. There was no one new that hadn’t already been tested and the door opened. Another suicide, I figured. There was an empty stool by me, and there he sat, uncomfortably at first, kind of anxious. He smiled at the bartender and watched the ballgame that was playing on TV. He ordered a beer. He didn’t say much, but he marveled at the TV and that game. After a while, he kept looking over at me. I looked back and we were looking at each other for a few minutes before he finally apologized for intruding.

“I’m sorry. But I think I know you,” he said. “In fact, I know I do.”

The bartender brought another drink and laid it before him. She smiled and glanced at me in a way I had never seen her glance. Then she went to the other side of the bar and stood there looking back at me. And when I looked back, I realized who sat before me.

“My mom always told me you never forget the people who truly loved you,” he grinned. His eyes and smile were the same. My God he had grown to be such a handsome young man. And in his face, I could see her and I knew, despite everything, I was not absolved of it.

It was my wife’s son. My ex-wife’s. I suppose death divorced us long ago. She surely had moved on and married again in life, and maybe again. “Watching this makes me want to play again,” he pointed up to the TV. I have a couple gloves in the car. Would you like to go to the park and throw? Maybe take some BP? I’m sure I got a bat, too.”

I stood up and looked back at the bartender who smiled at me. The kid walked out and I followed. I must have paused briefly at the door, unsure of myself for a minute. There was a classic VW outside along the bar curb. Yellow with clean whitewall tires. I stood there and looked at it. “Mom’s,” he laughed. “I’m still saving up. You comin’?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

“You remember when I used to knock you down with the ball?”

I shook my head and smiled. “Yeah. I do. And I would knock you down, too. You always fell so dramatically. You remember when I tried to teach you how to handle the bully at daycare who would bite you?”

He looked at me as he drove and smiled. “No. But I can imagine it.”

I shook my head.

We got to the park and it was so warm and sunny I had to take off my sweater. It felt much warmer and sunnier than the pub and the breeze blew easy through the open window. He parked and jerked the E-brake. “Well, here we are,” he said.

“Here we are,” I repeated contentedly. The mountain bordered the park and I couldn’t help to look over at the trail I once walked up when it was so cold and dark and I was in chaos. I rubbed my head, but there was no hole in the temple. I carried the gloves and a bag of balls and he carried a bat. I got ahead of him in my anticipation to play ball again. “Are you coming?” I smiled.

We were halfway to the diamond crossing the large field when I looked back at him. And there he was. Only he wasn’t a young man of drinking age who could drive his mom’s car. He was suddenly him again. The three-year-old boy I knew and loved, and he was dragging the bat like it was the heaviest thing in the world. I couldn’t make any sense of it and I stood there and watched him in the sunlight walking towards me. In my excitement, I picked him up and carried him the rest of the way. I wasn’t in shock of it at all. It seemed like how things were meant to be.

He was a natural fastball hitter and he could field with the best of them, for a three-year-old. We played for what seemed like an hour, if there was time. Then a car pulled up and there she stood. “You boys having fun?”

I must have stood there staring at her for a long time, if time existed. He dropped his glove and ran to her. She gave him a hug and a kiss and I walked slowly to her, hesitant in my disbelief. She asked if we were ready to go to dinner at her dads and I said we were, still mystified, but doing my best not to appear to be for fear that my amazement, my positive reaction, would cause it to go away the way my negative reaction to her ending our marriage and pregnancy had given me no hope living to redeem myself in her eyes. She smiled at me and gave me a kiss. Then she opened the backdoor of the SUV and disappeared behind the door. When she came back around she was holding the most beautiful baby I have ever seen in my life. She smiled at me, as though she knew well where I had been. “Do you want to hold your son, dad?”

All I could say to her is, my favorite thing I had ever said to her, “I do.”

 

Don’t cry for me. I am whole again. Heart and soul.