And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

back and forth

“Tell me that we danced, Noahnoah. Tell me that that’s what it’s like to fall in love, like you don’t have room for yourself in your own feet.”

“How did you fall in love with her?” the boy asks.

Grandpa’s hands land with one palm on his own knee and one on the boy’s.

“She got lost in my heart, I think. Couldn’t find her way out. Your grandma always had a terrible sense of direction. She could get lost on an escalator.”

“I miss the dawn. The way it stamped its feet at the end of the water, increasingly frustrated and impatient, until there was no more holding back the sun. The way it sparkled right across the lake, reached the stones by the jetty and came onto land, its warm hands in our garden, pouring gentle light into our house, letting us kick off the covers and start the day. I miss you then, darling sleepy you. Miss you there.”

“Death isn’t fair.”

“No, death is a slow drum. It counts every beat. We can’t haggle with it for more time.”

She kisses him.

“I know that the way home is getting longer and longer every morning. But I loved you because your brain, your world, was always bigger than everyone else’s. There’s still a lot of it left.”

“I miss you unbearably.”

“I’m angry because you think everything happened by chance but there are billions of people on this planet and I found you so if you’re saying I could just as well have found someone else then I can’t bear your bloody mathematics!”

“When you looked straight at me when I was seventy I fell just as hard as I did when I was sixteen.” She smiles.

“I’m bad at good-byes,” says the boy.

Grandpa’s lips reveal all his teeth when he smiles.

“We’ll have plenty of chances to practice. You’ll be good at it. Almost all grown adults walk around full of regret over a good-bye they wish they’d been able to go back and say better. Our good-bye doesn’t have to be like that, you’ll be able to keep redoing it until it’s perfect. And once it’s perfect, that’s when your feet will touch the ground and I’ll be in space, and there won’t be anything to be afraid of.”

“Isn’t it? I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it’s just children and old people who laugh.”