He’s saying something. I pretend to be listening. I want to be listening for real but my ears aren’t fully working. Still, I look his way. I nod. I catch enough to know the topic is about a video game he’s been playing and something about frustrating glitches. I want to care. He’s not a writer but he listens when I share my stories. Most of the time. I want to do the same for him. But I keep getting lost in magnolia fields. Wondering if they remember the feeling of ancient beetles, if they miss the dinosaurs. Wondering if they, too, half listen as they think about distant realities. Wondering if they think at all. And then I’m imagining myself a flower, budding open into jurassic times. Can we be related to trees? Could my ancestor’s ancestor have been piston and stem? He asks a question that pulls me back for a moment enough to respond: “Hmm?” He says it again and it’s something about whether the games I play do that, too. I don’t catch what that is. I don’t play games like his. I design imaginary rooms with real furniture and I connect colors back into their spectrums. I play relaxing games while he goes to war. Now I’m thinking about him at war and each word that shoots from his mouth becomes a bullet or blood and I really want to listen but I can’t face the idea that any word could be his last. Did I even answer the question? Have I become the question myself? I interrupt him by opening my arms and wrapping myself around him like a blanket. He doesn’t question me. He is never the question. He folds himself over my folding into him and we become parentheses for all of the in-between thoughts we hold until they drop so we can better hold ourselves.
As published by Garden of Neuro publishing in A Safe and Brave Space Vol. 3, summer 2024
Lisa Hartsgrove 