by K. Marie Black

It is an ordinary day. I just walked through my apartment in much the same way as I have for the past eight years. Out the dining room window, the sun is shining, but it is shining in the way it does on Sundays and holidays, casting light that signifies the suspension of normal activity. However, it is neither Sunday nor a holiday. I scan the apartment for some sense of difference, but notice no sign of outward change. But even if the apartment insists on remaining relentlessly neutral, I am changed.

"Wow, you look great," was the first thing he said to me. It wasn't the first time we met, but it was the first time we really spoke. We had met rather unceremoniously through work. We shook hands and he nodded at me with a professional detachment that very nearly shrouded his attraction. The second meeting he was more conversational, proffering insights like, "It looks like you like a shoe with a solid heel," referring to my supercool nobody-but-the-French-and-EastBerliners-wear-these ankle boots.

Two days later, after multiple cigarettes, a great deal of matted hair, and a lecture on how I didn't want to live with anyone unless we were married, he moved in. I remember thinking that it takes a letter three days to cross America, but in the course of two days, our lives had changed forever. Within six months, amid much felicity and none too inconsiderable fanfare, we married.

It was his sincerity that struck me. He was from the moment we spoke sincerely smitten and passionate for me. It simply took my breath away almost as easily as it melted my defenses. This was a unique experience for me. Men of my generation were too skittish, too unwilling to commit. But I shared a common culture with them, one built around similar icons, history, etc., so I was attracted to the lot of them, no matter how emotionally green they were. However, I was getting frustrated waiting for the proverbial wine to age into something finer. Older men were fine, but there was often something sleepy about them, some resignation. Like they had been blunted by having to live through the sexual revolution. More importantly, how could I discuss the social implications of "Scooby Doo Where Are You" with them?

I remember remarking to myself how lucky I was because I didn't have to compromise, as was often the case with relationships. He was my Sun, Moon, Earth, and Water, integrating all those elements into a fine friend, lover, priest, father, and son. "It's a gift," he would say slyly as he faded off to sleep.

I turn on the stereo and walk into the bedroom. The sounds of Crowded House mist through the house like fine sprays of valium. I hear voices: "What does your chart say?" he would ask semi-longingly. "My chart says that if you or your member come within a five-mile radius of my uterus, you will expand your family tree." He always liked my fertile nature, said it gave me a creative edge. Wrestling on the bed, I told him he was too much the literalist.

It was not a perfect marriage. There were the troubles, annoyances, petty attempts for control. Like how he smacked his food or cleared his throat or ate beef 16,000 times a week. Like how I procrastinated and whined about money and nagged him about his health habits. There were days of not speaking, feeling rejected, and wishing for those glorious first days when everything is so simple, so utterly geared towards making love, sleeping, or making love. Food was optional. Not a perfect marriage, but it was a strong relationship -- an A- in a C+ world.

And now it's gone. More precisely, he's gone.

It wasn't the excess of beef that did "it," or the cigarettes (he called those "dessert") or the lack of exercise (he called that his "encore"). He likened his body to a performance art piece, a monument to "dis" health. We laughed about this while I tried various ways of making broccoli look and taste like steak. Rather, it was an executioner on wheels that got him. A silver Japanese streak that slithered down the street like a snake, only with about 100 Gs more momentum. We were crossing the street downtown, going to get coffee, I think. Meanwhile, the vehicle made its inevitable trajectory from Point A, a bar, no doubt, to Point B, my husband's body.

I have what some might consider an irrational fear of crossing the street. Even I consider it irrational. I must have either been run down in my last lifetime or almost hit in the early stages of this one. Either way, I must look both ways at least sixty times before one foot drops onto the street. This process usually delays me about thirty seconds and anyone who is privy to my neurosis knows to simply let me be. "Oh, you silly girl," my husband would always say once I reached my destination, often accompanying his mockery with a bear hug.

His manner of crossing the street was precise, much like all his actions were. He would tip his hat to safety by looking both ways and then crossing like any other normal human being. This was not enough for driver X, who punished him mightily by hitting him in such a way that the only way he could break his fall was with his head. For the next two days, he and I battled for his life: he, in a quiet, swollen way, which provided the perfect compliment to my ad hoc primal scream therapy. When the underage doctor with a pen stain on his lab coat and crooked bow tie serenely told me that there was no hope, I quieted, trying to figure out my strategy for revenge. I decided that the acronym for Wives Against Drunk Drivers, WADD, sounded far too undignified to consider seriously. When they pulled the plug, I opted for sedation.

The funeral was not sedate. My husband's will specified that I was to first throw a big party at this posh restaurant that we had both come to worship, and then I was to spread his ashes anywhere in the world that I deemed worthy of him. (Did the irony that I deemed no such place worthy escape him?) The party was a civilized affair despite all my attempts to derail it. Lots of folks showed up: family, close friends, those annoying little peripheral friends who come because they think they should, and Sid. Sid is my best friend from college, who always has something irreverent to say and punctuates that with copious amounts of sarcasm and pot. After the party waned, Sid and I stepped outside onto the empty weekend street and lit up. The marriage of pot and alcohol proved just the right combo for making the stupidest thing sound hysterical. One burp or similar nod to bodily humor and we were melting with laughter onto the downtown pavement.

The cop who walked up and saw us, however, was not so amused. Sid ran to my rescue to explain the situation. I took the opportunity to invoke my God given right for inappropriate Drama Queen behavior. Didn't he see that I was shattered? . Couldn't he tell from my black attire and the sort of confused expression on my face? "Don't pigs have senses of smell?" I taunted. The cop made motion to his handcuffs. "I'm the walking dead," said I, trying to balance myself on the curb while striking my best crucifixion pose. "Incarceration worries me none. Let them all come." They would have, too, if not for Sid.

Disorderly conduct notwithstanding, it is Now and the Future that worry me. Now, I can remain mildly philosophical, thinking in that Eastern way about how this has to do with Karma and wondering if actions in a former life of mine somehow determined the outcome of this one. But this is not the East, and if it were, the only way I can figure that this is Karma is if I was Adolf Eichmann in my last incarnation. In the Future, I have the five stages of grief to embrace, and having to repeat "Table for one" to those silly little restaurant hostesses who will look blankly at me when I say it the first time. Rather like swimming in the Great Salt Lake with an open head wound.

The way I see it, life may as well be a holding pattern until I reach the next dimension. When my husband was alive, we had our whole lives to look forward to.