Abigail M. Schilling

Sixty four hours!

Seventy three!

You're always beating me with the how many hours worked tally. It's all those working plane flights. If I was stuck in a plane I would work too. Except I don't understand how you type without getting your elbows filed off. I had a plane flight a few weeks back wherein I had to file some elbows. It was a puddle-jumper flight from Ontario to San Jose where I was picking up a car and this suit sitting next to me just kept wedging his elbow into my space.

Am I a suit?

I look you up and down. Of course you're a suit. A very expensive suit that just bought me very expensive dinner. But you're a different kind of expensive suit. You're the kind who's doing time to save up the 401K and cash-in-on-retirement plan so you can retire when you're 33 and stay home with the kids. You're the kind of suit I'll marry someday.

Just someday?

***

We're off for the week together. We've spent most of the time sleeping and shopping. You really wanted to try that new organic place and we did. I wanted to repaint the bathroom; it turns out the undertones in the marigold really were marigold. After a thousand trips to the store we successful changed the color of the bathroom and learned the life stories of all the Home Depot employees.

Last night, our last night before you left again, I was watching you watching me; I wish I knew what you were thinking. For all the thoughts we share, for all the times we finish each other sentences or don't even have to start them, there are so many things I don't know about you.

You asked me when we were having wine after dinner, "will I ever know your life?" I said, "yes" and "someday" as if that would be possible. As if it would be possible to fully know all of another person. I heard that's what marriage is about, but really, I'm too jaded to even believe it.

***

They used to ask if I was sad that you're gone again and I was never sad. More empty. But so full from you. Topped off like a full tank of gas, and full like that feeling after a huge family meal when I need a minute to gear up for pumpkin pie. When I find a couch corner next to great uncle Franklin, or when your sister's youngest son curls up on the crook where my lap meets the couch, and I take a nap.

Sleeping with you reminds me of that nap. You are the couch, or the youngest son, or the crook where my lap meets the couch. You are all these things always to me.

This morning, while you were making breakfast, I was awake. I couldn't open my eyes but I could hear you near. When you stood over and watched me sleeping I almost grabbed out and pulled you down onto me. But then you were there already. In the crook, your hand on my forehead, my ear, my neck. Your thumb over my lips and over them again.

No, it's true, I miss you already.

Letter to a Traveling Lover (part I)
Letter to a Traveling Lover (part II)