Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines In Pieces On The Ground

Entry 1    1:18 a.m. 

Her breathing is shallow and rapid. She is so sick. Jane, Kim and I spent the night talking, with me regaling them with fond remembrances of Jenny. I have so many. When we moved in together in a small apartment, we lived near Larry's Market on Aurora. We would get romaine lettuce and Larry's fresh Caeser dressing, eat the salad together and watch Seinfeld and Jeopardy sitting next to one another. It's in that same apartment where I used to have Jenny in tears of laughter enacting terrible shadow puppet plays at night as we lay together in our king-sized bed. We were happy, our frontiers unmapped, unseen, unknown, unmeasured and unexplored.

I want to wrap my arms around her and suck all of her sickness into my breast. I want to travel the world with her again, to have her laugh at me as I am inadvertently hitting Ticos on the head while I am trying to heft my backpack into the rear of a bus bound for Arenal. I want to relive walking the 4 miles to the midwife in Manhattan when she was 9 months pregnant, only to be told by her midwife it would be days before she was ready to have a baby, and then 12 hours later at NYU Downtown Medical Center as she gave birth to Leiney.  I want to be dressed as Georgie Miller again, celebrating her 30th birthday, crooning standards to her in our friend's one bedroom apartment with only a grand piano and 20 friends between us. I want to be filming our feet as we lay together in our bed laughing gloriously after our first hike in the Costa Rican rain forest. If only we were dancing naked again in our faux penthouse apartment windows on West 3rd and Mercer in Greenwich Village (naked Cramp dancing a la the Capitol Hill store) only discovering after we moved out that people could see us clearly in the 8 foot tall windows.  Or buying a teapot in a store just off Drury Lane, picking mountain flowers in Arosa, holding our fussy newborn Abby. I want to be our teenaged selves, counselors at Muscular Dystrophy camp, innocently flirting, unaware we would journey the better part of our lives together. I want Christmas at Omi's, the venerated Swiss traditions observed with deep love and reverence, each of us with a baby in our laps while singing Christmas carols. I don't want her to die. I want to go in her place.


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