I Ascend by Eric Daniel Metzgar

 

Over the years, my wife must’ve told me she loved me fifty thousand times. She said it so much I didn’t even hear it. It was like the words ‘I love you’ were as used up as my own name. She’d say she loved me when I woke up, when I came downstairs, when I went out to the fields, when I came in from the fields, when I got out of the bathtub, when I sat down for dinner, and before I went to bed. The only thing is, she didn’t know what she was saying, and that was because my wife was trying to live like the people on her shows. If they were crying, she was crying all day. If they got suspect of someone, she got suspect and made the whole house tense. And when someone died, her heart broke and she made sure to keep telling everyone she loved them.

The fact is that my wife didn’t know love. She said it, but she never showed it. Unless I took her hand while we were sitting in the church pews, we never touched each other. After the making of our last child, unless I kissed her on the lips for cooking up a full and blissful supper, we never had a romantic moment.

I did love her some, and somewhere above all her imitations, maybe she loved me some too. After fifty years of sleeping beside each other, there had to have been some love built up between us. But walking up that mountain with her in my long and recent past, a wave of wishes came onto me and made me heartsick. I wish she and I had spoken of time passing.  I wish we had taken a few nights to sit together out under the sky. I wish we had told each other more of our hidden thoughts, and I wish I’d put my arm around her and squeezed her close on those nights when I talked myself out of it.

I climbed higher and higher up the mountain thinking about my wife and other things gone. My hunger passed into calm, and I slipped down into an unfamiliar mood. I knew I was getting a bit feverish from my illness, but I was past any point of returning for help. I was heading fast into disorientation, but I didn’t mind. The trees started to take new shapes, looking more like hanging arms than branches. They seemed to be pointing me towards something, so I picked up my pace. The clouds picked up their pace too, and flew with me until the whole trail seemed to be flowing with me.

But the delirium didn’t last for long on account of bad luck. The wind was brushing new seeds from the trees, and the air was thick with them, like a fog of kernels. A drifting seed flew right into my mouth and down into my throat. I started coughing fiercely. The coughing triggered my sick lungs, and they tightened right up. I coughed until my chest ached, but I still couldn’t stop. I dropped down onto the roots of an enormous old tree. I fit right between them. I stuck my head as tight as I could between two big old roots. I pressed as hard as I could to distract myself from the pain in my chest, but it didn’t help. The coughing wouldn’t stop.

There was no parade of big ideas. There was no passing from one kingdom to another. There were no voices, trumpets, bells, whistles, angels or gates. There was only thumping and slightly slowed time. Every thumping cough wedged my head deeper between the roots. And every time my head was wedged deeper, the inside view in my head grew clearer. I never knew how many thoughts I had in my head until that coughing started squeezing them out. One after the next, useless visions of this and that started pouring out of me.

The dreams came out with the regrets. The memories spread into clouds, and then blew out over the valley. The sights and sounds of my life blended like paint, into brown, into glass, then they shattered and spattered outward. Finally, there was an empty body of space where were my thoughts. I was wedged tight, fixed between the roots,thoughtless.

For once, I didn’t have a view of myself. I didn’t know how time was passing, and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there. The mountain was every touch to my body—a mother’s breast and a preacher’s feet. So I suckled and prayed. I had shrunk back into a silly boy.

Then just like an animal hearing a noise, I lifted my head and all around was the busy practice of nature. I didn’t have a thought about whether I was alive or dead. All I saw was the unimpressed face of God stretching from the sky to the ground. I stood up into the view and felt added to it. I stayed there and waited for my first thought.