Illustration by Arty Guava
I awaken to the sound of him in the den stubbing his toe on my piano, swearing. He can never sneak around while I sleep. I lie silent, listening to him move around the rooms. In the kitchen now and there’s that chink of ice in a glass, splashes of liquid, a pause before he drinks. I don’t want the sounds of him to end. There are his heavy footsteps coming back to our bedroom, his throat clearing. A sniff and rustle of cloth. I turn over in bed, the blanket covering half my face. Does he notice my stare in the dim light? He stands at his desk with a pen in hand, scribbling notes on a sheet of paper. I smile, brushing my hair from my eyes. He is always writing. I can’t think of a time I haven’t seen him suddenly pause, when an idea strikes him, before scrambling for pen and paper. He’s never shown me what he writes. Instead, he chooses to offer an embarrassed ramble or an excited summary if I ask, but only if the ideas are ready and we’re alone.
Was it only yesterday that we were at the coffee shop just steps from our apartment, sitting at our usual table overlooking the street? Yesterday I watched him sitting across from me while steam swirled around the rim of our mugs, before slowly rising to the surface. Yesterday I watched him lift the cup to his lips. Watched him swallow. Even then I was caught by his movements. His hands rising and falling to scratch the spot behind his ear, his head tilting to look out the window then dipping back to the open notebook. A half-filled page. Pencil ready to be touched. I watched him write.
I always watch him when he writes. It’s one of the few times when I catch his face softening. He’ll take off his favourite army printed cap I bought him from the shop around the corner, then run a hand through his hair in concentration before putting his hat back on, tugging down his visor once, twice. Like a ritual. My Jae is a Roughneck by trade, but a storyteller at heart.
His stories have often saved me in soothing my limbs back to life whenever my body gave in to the struggle of my invisible disability that often shows different colours for different people. Mine is triggered by flashing lights, scents of eucalyptus, and even sadness or stress. It’s one of the reasons why I keep a bright disposition. Better to be happy and free to create and dream, rather than being trapped in a cell of fear. To me, Jae’s stories are a balm and a muse for my own art in music and drawing.
I watch him pack some notebooks and a few fountain pens. I gave him a notebook for his twenty-seventh birthday, but he lost it to the Atlantic. He said the wind lifted it from his bench and gave it to the ocean. I don’t like the thought of him there, drilling for oil, on a platform with cranes swaying heavy equipment above his head. When he finally comes home, sore and beaten from his long days, we curl together on the couch, listening to the radio. It’s funny, he doesn’t want to do anything else.
And me? I just want to listen to his breath as he falls asleep and feel the weight of his arm around me. His callused hands have scars and there are fresh bruises on his arms I can’t help fussing over.
“It’s part of the job,” he always says with a shrug. Part of his life. Salt of the earth, salt on my skin. His voice on the wind when I open my window, alone for months on end.
Oh, my darling, I’ll take him—cuts, bruises and all. But I hold my breath at the idea of heavy metal or chains, sharp against his skin. As if by inhaling I can pause the world, make machines hover, tools bend, blur the edges until silver and grit become soft and safe. Jae once tried to explain how he works with highly combustible material. Why did he think that would make me feel better? My storyteller belongs here with me, but in a few hours, a helicopter will carry him east to the drilling rig. Leaving me alone with my worries and this fresh battle with epilepsy. It’d be easier if I wasn’t so new at this. A fresh bride. A found home. Eyes shut. Take five breaths, deep.
Even so, sometimes when the day is hard that neurologist’s words come back to me. We’ll increase the dose. Small white pills twice daily will save you. What they didn’t say, and for years, in my experience, I felt: It won’t matter if you lose your art, your words, your soul because your body will be yours again. Docile. Controllable. Blank. So I shut the door to the doctor’s office, despite her protests for me to stay. Three years ago today, I decided I wanted my mind to be mine.
His stories have often saved me in soothing my limbs back to life whenever my body gave in to the struggle of my invisible disability that often shows different colours for different people. Mine is triggered by flashing lights, scents of eucalyptus, and even sadness or stress. It’s one of the reasons why I keep a bright disposition. Better to be happy and free to create and dream, rather than being trapped in a cell of fear. To me, Jae’s stories are a balm and a muse for my own art in music and drawing.
She didn’t understand how keppra made my steps heavy, my thoughts grey. Inspiration comes with colours. But there was no light during those years in the fog.
I still don’t know what triggered my brain to break a few years before I knew him, what made those genes express. But I do know that he is the only one who helps me breathe, who keeps the seizing at bay. What I need to accept is that I can do this on my own. Yes, he saved me that night at Mont Tremblent where we met. During a trip with mutual friends, I had a little too much to drink— an attempt to stifle my introverted nerves. I must have been overwhelmed with feelings. A mix of anxiety. A mix of a buzz. Unfamiliar ground and lack of proper sleep, as fun trips ask for. It must have been too much in one day or one night. I remember feeling what my doctor then called an aura. A pressure in my stomach, rising up to my chest like a long, thick ribbon, squeezing a hint of what was to come. So I slipped away from the party, back to my shared room, alone and on the bed. Ready to just let the storm take me and wait it out.
I remember my limbs shuddering on the blankets. My friends surrounding me. One runs to the other hotel room when someone says, “She said Jae’s been able make her feel calm.”
“I don’t know if she’ll want him to see her like this.”
“Can we ask her?”
“Try. She said she can hear everything when this happens.”
And I can. I’m gasping to say it.
“Mirai, do you want me to get him?”
So hard to speak.
“Mirai, if you can hear us.”
“Yes,” I manage a whisper.
Jae at the door, on the bed. My hand in his. “Five breaths. Come on, Mirai, breathe with me. That’s it.”
Later, our friends say, “You and him. This needs to happen.” And it did. It does.
I will never tire of his mouth on mine, gently drawing breath past my lips, awakening me.
When I found out he was a rig man, I was intrigued. It felt exotic; the danger, exciting. As time passed, the reality of his life settled in. Whenever we said goodbye, I tried to push away the lead of doubt in the back of my throat. He must be safe. He must be warm. He must be fed good meals that will carry him through the day into the next. Who else but me can make him laugh in those tenor notes with brown eyes crinkled?
But what if he wasn’t? What if all of this was just a game, a lie behind my shut eyes so if I opened them, our world would disappear?
Life is a delicate plane with lines running parallel to each other until they slip off the edge, as if none of it matters. Fear is familiar. Haunting my steps and just at the edge of my vision. What if I never see him again? Is this our last moment together? Every time he felt my fears slip through, he’d ruffle my hair, pull me into him in a tight embrace. Sometimes Jae placed his hand on my chest, just above my heart. He felt warm, solid, stable.
“I’m here. The rig won’t take me from you. You’re my heart and I’ll always come back. Feel me, feel this. Nothing will change.”
Memories are a slippery deck. A few weeks after we first met five years ago, I asked him why he chose his profession and he smiled that mischievous grin. His eyes, playful.
“I felt the ocean’s pull,” he said.
“Be serious,” I said. We shared a mixed berry slush from a food truck at the beach.
“What? I thought you wanted a poet.” He laughs at my pout. “Here’s the first thing you should know about me, Mirai. I’m always serious,” he said before suddenly pulling me to the waves. He tripped in the sand and I went down with him, laughing while the ocean slid over us as if it too wanted to play, to run and be remembered.
I remember the salt in the air as the waves reached for our toes, lapping at them while we walked along the shore. Later we watched kites, skipped rocks and made love on his bed in the basement. He wrote me a letter after he left for the rig the next day. What followed thereafter was a simple courtship where the sight of mail made my eyes light up. But it was never enough.
I want more than just his words scratched across the page. I want to lean into his chest, reach up and slip into his open mouth, past parted lips and wet tongue, where I could slide down his throat, fall into his belly and sink into the folds of him.
“Mirai, it’s early. You should go back to sleep,” Jae says now from across the room.
I smile at him.
“It’s too late for that,” I say, sitting up. “You weren’t going to say goodbye?”
The blanket falls to my waist and I feel the wind on my skin from the open window. He comes over to me, tracing his fingers and thumb across my back, not saying a word before he kisses my shoulder and steps away.
“I’m nearly done,” he says. “Just a few more things to find and pack. Have you seen my knife?”
“Check the couch? It might have fallen when we got in.”
I become aware of music filtering from the den. A mandolin trickles through the walls while a voice croons about seeing without eyes, a first kiss in living waters. We must have left the radio on last night in our hurry to get to bed.
I want to say, “Don’t go.”
Instead, I notice how light from the hall pools through a crack in the door slanting gold across the rug, where it catches the shape of his foot. Will he stay if I slip out of bed and bend down to kiss it? I pull the blanket around my shoulders, and wonder if I’ll still feel him inside me long after he leaves, melting into the city lights.
I want to say, “Stay with me,” and I know that if I get up and wrap myself around him, his steady heartbeat will quicken.
“What are you thinking?” he says.
“Can’t you tell by now?”
It will be another six months until he’ll come home. How different will we be in that span of time? I watch him fold a shirt, pack a sketch we bought yesterday at Kensington Market, before placing them in his suitcase.
“You know I don’t want to leave,” he says.
“Then stop.”
He presses his lips together, picking up a pair of pants tossed under a chair, shaking them out before folding and rolling them up. I watch his fingers move against the fabric and feel overwhelmed with the sudden need to take them in my mouth. Will he care if I stop him now with my tongue sliding across his fingertips? Can he catch images of us running across my mind? Perhaps he does, because he pauses, biting the inside of his cheek before looking at me across the room.
Jae, hold my gaze and don’t look away. Stay here in our room in this space where it could be just our eyes and our lips, drifting. Am I making sense? Do my thoughts reach your ears? Haven’t we always been connected? Come closer. Step close so I can whisper words I’ve been wanting to say from the first time you took my hand on the mountain, stopped my body from shaking, and brought me back to this world with my name on your lips.
It’s dawn. I notice how sunrise makes the room blush, and I imagine him on the plane watching the cabin slowly drink up the light, flooding waking faces with pink and gold.
“When did you become so serious?” he says and I blink, back in our room.
Yesterday. Today. Right now.
Reaching across the bed, I pick up his leather bracelet. Only I know about that patch of pale skin around his wrist where the sun can’t catch. I get out of bed and go to him. He stands still as I take his arm, buckling the bracelet around his wrist. I slide my hand into his, but he pulls back slightly, hesitating.
“Mirai,” he says, “you promised you wouldn’t.”
But already he leans into me and I can feel his breath on my skin.
“Tell me what happens if you miss your plane,” I say.
“Get dressed.”
“I’m not coming with you.”
“Then go back to bed.”
“Carry me?”
His smile is gentle. His hands are large and strong. Jae shakes his head, “Not yet.”
I find a shirt on the dresser and pull it on.
“Tell me you’ll miss me.”
“You know I will,” he says.
“I need to hear it.”
“Let me go, Mirai,” his voice is deep, velvet and worn.
In the weeks that led up to this morning my mind was split—half on our days together, and half in this moment. My chest tightens. I feel desperate for breath and more time. What else can I do to bottle these memories so in my moments alone, waiting, I can relive how he smells of peppermint and grass grown wild?
“Look at me,” he says. “I’ll come back. Nothing’s going to hurt you.”
I nod and know the lie, but find comfort in it.
Jae, I want you to look up at the sky and think of me on nights when you feel the weight of the day on your shoulders. Think of my lips against your neck, our fingers entwined. Do you know how much I need you to stay? Not just to keep me company, but to protect me from the lightning storm that will shake my limbs again, twisting my tempest tree flesh until I come back to the world, gasping. You’re the only one who can stop St. Vitus from spinning. Bring me back to myself.
I’d ask him to tell me a story while I wait for the strength to fill my limbs, so I could move on my own again. When he did, it felt as if we were travelling across his world in a wagon, our bodies swaying in a gentle rhythm past beasts of all sizes, from all realms. A world rich with history and myth, where he showed me battles fought by armies across mountains, or Fae leading lost children through forests with eyes wide and wet. How did I repay him for all of our days and nights spent waking in different lives?
I step into the den, switch off the radio and put a record on. Black vinyl spin. Silver needle hitting its mark. Then I turn back to him. He’s watching me, arms at his sides.
“Come here,” I say.
We step out into the living room where music holds us together.
“You’ll let me know if anything happens?” he asks, wrapping one arm around my waist and holding my hand with his other. We sway from one foot to the other, spinning in a slow circle.
“Yes,” I say into his chest. “But you’ll be too far to do anything.”
He rests his chin on my head and sighs.
“Promise me you’ll call,” he says. “As soon as you’re able.”
“Cross my heart.”
“Be serious, Mirai.”
“Don’t you know by now?” I ask.
He lifts his head from mine and I smile, craning my neck to look at him. I reach up to trace his thick brows and sigh. “I’ve always been serious.”
My fingers clench his shirt and I reach up to brush my nose against his skin along the open collar. Can he feel my breath? He says my name.
I rise on my toes, a dancer, so my lips can brush his ear. “Change your mind?” I whisper.
He ruffles my hair in answer and I laugh, ducking out of his embrace, swatting his arm. Playfighting is a love language we understand.
Jae, right now, I want our feet to grow roots through these planks of wood. This apartment is ours. This room and this song in this moment. Jae, how do you feel knowing we will never experience these exact feelings in this space of time again? Everything and everyone in a state of change makes each experience memorable. That’s how I want this life to be. So what is constant are the ones who matter.
We stand here for a while longer as if waiting. The singer croons about being gentle, safe in his arms.
Oh, my darling.
And this is it. This is our song. Jae brings my hand up to his lips, brushing my fingers, all tender.
He slowly spins me around, singing softly and a little off key, “Oh, my darling.”
I can’t help but smile.
Long after he shuts the door behind him and I hear the key in the lock, his footsteps fading down the hall . . . Long after I push the curtains open to let in the morning light, set up the French press, slip off his shirt and slip on mine . . . I step into the washroom and look at my reflection. My hand drifts up to my head, as if it can pinpoint the spot in my brain that loses control. Mirai, you mustn’t fear less than a minute of a storm. If it takes you, then think of his voice as if you were again with him in that room on the mountain.
I will carry his voice with me until the sun is high, until summer leaves change colour, while I go to work, translating films. When I’m out of the office blinking in the afternoon glaze. When the light is blinding off windshields and windows that line Yonge Street, carrying him with me on my way to meet old friends for drinks. And much later, when evening slips in, with a travel show on in the background, he is with me while I sketch boats on the open water.
Laughter and shouting blare from the TV— two men on motorbikes racing past trees and towns, one hungry and the other full of joy. Their world is green and their soundtrack is made for summer road trips. Guitars swell with drums in three quarters and I hum along, tie my hair back. The tips of my fingers are stained black from shading. This is how I find a moment of rest, keeping the fears at bay. See? I can do this on my own. My art and sounds distract me.
I sketch a memory of friends at drinks, their smiles wide, heads tipped back with joy. My piano tucked in the corner; a cat asleep on a rug. Next page, sketch a traveler under the sun —his pink cap shading his face. I give him a book under his arm and a dog. Jae loves dogs.
I wash my face. I’m tapping moisturizer on my skin when I hear my phone ring in the kitchen.
“Hi,” he says and I can hear the chatter and muffled shuffling around him.
“You’re safe?”
“I’m here. I’m safe. We’re about to head out. You’re getting ready for bed?”
“Just washing up. I sketched some today.”
“Nice, you have to show me when I get back. Send me one in the meantime?”
I smile and grip the receiver. A bead of water drips from my bangs and lands on the tile. I swipe it with my toe.
“I’ll send one tomorrow at lunch,” I say and, “I miss you.”
“I miss you too. The months will fly by, Mirai.”
“In the meantime?”
“Yes, we’ll write,” I can hear the smile in his voice. “I’ll call you when I get back to port. I love you.”
“Jae, ” I say, my lips brushing the receiver.
But someone calls for him in the background and he needs to go.
Our goodbye is short but soft, much like our song. Come let’s be gentle, be soft in my arms.
I wash my hands and finish patting the cream on my face. My eyes are wide, larger than I want them to be. Pressing down gently on my cheeks, I watch my skin sink at the pressure. Dimples. What am I doing? I untie my hair and shut off the TV before I sit down at the piano, lifting the lid. He is safe. And he loves me. The full moon rises, blue, and I slide my fingers across the keys, wiping off dust motes from the day. Inhale and my world grows still. Exhale and the city spills through our open window. Yes, I am alone, but ready, calm. Night blooms and as I play, I sing.
Kristine Sahagun is a second-generation Filipino Canadian writer and editor. She is a recipient of the Norma Epstein Award in Short Fiction, and her stories and poetry have appeared in the Hart House Review, Raconteur Magazine, Antigonish Review, and The New Quarterly. When she isn’t strumming her ukulele or pulling a warrior pose, she is happily downing too much coffee while writing her first novel. Her dog believes in her.