Slicing Tomatoes
by Samantha Leigh
What can I tell you that you don’t already know? So much I can tell you now, so much to show you that only time and experience create. You thought you’d reached the end; that life encompassed only what you could imagine with your mind, and no more. You knew you had lost. In your years, you had yet to experience what it meant to work and plan and sacrifice, then fail in your endeavors. And in this foreign act of losing, you were brought to a sudden and complete standstill. There was fear in the silence of your inaction, unlike any worry or panic felt before. This was fear at its purest. Fear that once brought to a halt, you would be unable to begin again.
It was the summer of your thirtieth year and you sat on the floor at the end of your hallway, your head against the wall and your feet planted on either side of the black garbage bag before you. Your feet were bare and slicked with sweat, sliding against the hardwood flooring, but your mouth was dry, your throat swollen and aching. Toys filled the bag. Playing cards, stuffed animals, a metal car - its yellow paint chipped, a favorite one-armed baby doll. Books overflowed from the top of the bag - a massive volume of Shakespeare beneath a dog-eared collection of Poe. Balanced atop a stuffed elephant were the paperbacks—John Irving, Alice Sebold, Doris Betts, Oates, Updike, Kerouac—one for every mood, comfort food in its finest form. And there, spilled out of the bag by your foot, Tuck Everlasting and your childhood copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends.
The books would be damaged in the bag, you knew, but you had neither the time, nor the will to gather the boxes you needed. There was packing to be done, clothes to fold, dishes to wrap, an entire household of belongings to collect into boxes you did not have and move to a place which was still unknown. They were coming. Who “they” were, you weren’t sure, and when “they” would arrive, you didn’t know. But you knew they were coming. They, who would tell you your home was a place you no longer belonged; that your life was a thing no longer yours.
You heard the children then, as I hear them now. Their voices came through the open kitchen window, eager, excited, planning the adventure you had told them about over breakfast that morning. You heard them speculate about the trip, what they might see, what they might do. Where are we going, Mama? Why isn’t Daddy coming? You painted a beautiful adventure for them filled with fun and delight, a journey where anything could happen. Anything. So easily the lies slipped off your tongue.
There were dishes piled in the sink. Bills stacked on the coffee table. A ring forming in the toilet and dust bunnies conquering the neighborhood beneath your bed. You lowered your head and let the hair fall over your eyes.
So this is losing. Exhaling, you let the feeling settle into your spine, wrap around your lungs. How did I lose?
Sitting there, at the end of the hall, you had no answer, but can I tell you now? Will you listen? You lost in minutes and seconds and vast spans of years. Through ignorance and arrogance. You mistook hope for trust. Weakness for tears. Blame for abuse. And the sheer power of your own determination for loyalty and commitment. You covered your ears to those who would speak the truth and listened instead to your own lying mind, thinking always you knew better. Thirteen years spent on a fool’s errand, believing the heart would triumph over all. You alone sat in the center of your own defeat, as the cause and the object, stripped bare of all your excuses.
Have I been harsh? I’ve meant only to be honest.
But there, in the hall, you knew only that you’d lost. You’d placed your life in another’s hands and in the absence of his presence, the gaping hole of his departure, there was no life to be found. To breathe took effort, to blink now required thought. Lifting your eyes you gazed vacantly into the kitchen. The calendar by the stove, the crayon drawings on the refrigerator, the dishes in the sink, the knife on the counter. You’d used the knife to slice the tomato you’d fried with breakfast that morning. After the meal the dishes had been added to the others in the sink, but the knife you had carefully washed, thoroughly dried, and placed not back in the drawer, but by itself on the counter. As if to think about…later.
Your gaze lowered from the knife, back down the hall, and to your own hand, rested limply on your lap. Turning your palm over, you stared with some interest at the pale inside of your wrist, tracing the fragile blue veins beneath the skin. You imagined you felt the blood that beat within. Imagined you felt it surging, rushing, racing back toward your heart. Imagined it being brought to a sudden and complete standstill.
How I wish I could reach through these last two years, just to hold your hands in mine. I have so much to tell you of our journey—the people we’ve met, the things we’ve done, you’d never believe. It truly has been an adventure. Terrifying, wonderful, a brand new world you could never imagine. You may not even recognize me, but I know you. You taught me so many things, but mainly you taught me what it meant to have courage. That courage isn’t found in the pages of a book, or only on the battlefield. You taught me that the purest form of courage is sometimes discovered in the smallest moment. And that day in the hall, you taught me that courage could be measured in the pressure of your palm against the floor when you turned it over and pushed yourself to your feet. And for this, I thank you.
Samantha Leigh is a lifelong lover of the written word and was inspired at a young age by the works of Twain, Alcott, Potter, and Poe. She is the mother of two children who provide an infinite supply of inspiration. The author of several short stories and one novel, Dark Legacy, Leigh is currently pursing her MFA in Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
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