Your wife catches me at the door. She’s headed to bookclub and wants my input on her outfit. “Vest or no vest?” While the vest makes her feel like Han Solo in a way she kind of likes, we decide no vest unless she gets cold. “He’s closing his eyes for a moment, but I left a burgundy molehair blazer and socks my sister knit by the bathroom for you. You’re welcome to them if you’d like.”
I walk in the back door of the artists’ home you two have cultivated. Pass the array of baskets and gardening gear through your kitchen with the black stone countertops. The postcard I sent you from Glacier this Summer is still on the fridge. Your home is full of antique furniture and art. Not in a stuffy way, but a real, lived way. Pieces you picked up or traded for at art shows. Symbols of you two’s combined taste. Which you might argue are one and the same now, and then tell a story a few minutes later proving that inaccurate, “this piece took some convincing…”
I steal a long peek at you in the living room. Reclined in your sitting chair, hands tucked under opposite arm, smiling with your new AirPods in. You love them because they work both as noise-cancelling and as hearing aids.
I tiptoe on your slightly creaky real hardwood floors to my potential new jacket. I take her in, gorgeous material, but maybe not my cut. I don’t try it on. I feel no urgency to have more of either of your belongings just because. Except maybe your journals, I am still coveting them post-death, but that’s not just because. Instead, I’m drawn to the light coming through the room you refer to as The Beautiful Room.
Sun pours through the south facing windows lining the soft, earthy orange walls. It amazed me, but didn’t surprise you, that I’d painted my bedroom in the same faux clay technique, just in rusty pinks instead of oranges. The sun casts drapes over your meditation bench where you sit routinely each morning with your face towards the sky. I lean against the sturdy door frame. Your 18yo cat Kiki is curled up on the room’s guest bed, surrounded by textured pillows on a tapestry duvet. How lovely to take a cat nap here in The Beautiful Room.
I am drawn to join. A softness in my heart wants to rest in a place like this. For a moment, it crosses my mind that this is inappropriate for some reason. Maybe I should wait outside. You are asleep. I didn’t ask permission. Maybe it’s inappropriate to feel at home in my elder male friend’s house. Too vulnerable, too innocent. I determine quickly and trust it is not inappropriate at all. I join Kiki by lying on my right side in the warmth. I tuck your Mexican blanket between my knees and close my eyes. My shoed feet over the edge. I am not worried, I am not nervous, there’s nothing else for me to do but to be welcome and at ease.
Later, you tell me you’ve decided you’d like to live a long time. My heart thanks you repeatedly, while my mouth offers a joke, “glad to hear it, about time”, and I hope we have some choice in these things.
x little sister
Just beautiful. I feel the sun of The Beautiful Room, the luxurious rest my soul wants to share. Your words, their “aliveness”, “newness”, “humanness,”
draw me in. Ahhhhhh.
Shhhhhh