Your knees are attractive; it’s a shame to bloody them
present
It’s seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, which is a guarantee of two things.
One: Kira is wide-awake and has been for over an hour now, sitting on the couch watching cartoons.
Two: I’m semi-awake, sitting on the couch next to Kira watching cartoons…through closed eyelids.
I haven’t slept in past six o’clock in the morning for eleven years.
I’m not complaining. My kids are only little once. The boys sleep in now, and I’m sure she’s not far behind them in making the shift.
“Daddy, are we going to the beach today?”
I answer with my eyes still closed, “Is it raining?” The weatherman on the local news last night said it’s supposed to rain today.
She walks to the front door and opens it; I guess an accurate weather assessment requires immersion and not a simple peek out the window.
“What’s this?” Kira asks curiously, looking at the ground outside the front door. Curiosity is not always a good thing when it comes to Kira. She’s fearless. The kind of fearless that requires trust. Her trust is a bottomless pit. Trust that the world is good and nothing bad ever happens. But even when bad does happen, like getting stung by a bee when she was three because it looked soft and fuzzy and irresistible to tiny fingers, or bad like her mom leaves the family and moves out of state, she never loses her trust. She’s still fearless.
I walk to the door for a close-up examination of the this half of what’s this.
There on the W…E mat is a cane. It’s wooden, and though it’s not bulky, it looks substantial, like it serves its purpose and serves it well. And it’s obvious it’s had plenty of opportunity to serve well. The varnish and stain are worn away on the handle and the bottom foot shows some battle scars. There’s an envelope underneath it, and my name is written on it.
When I see my name, a few things bubble up in me.
The first is embarrassment because someone thinks I need this. It makes my stomach lurch.
The second is anger because someone thinks I need this. It makes my stomach boil.
The third is foreign, a traitor that has invaded my bitter existence. It’s relief because someone thinks I need this. It makes my stomach settle.
But relief only sticks around for a nanosecond because I’m a stubborn, thirty-four-year-old man. I refuse to use a cane.
Canes scream helplessness, weakness, and deterioration.
That’s not me.
I may not be able to feel my legs from the waist down, except for occasional pinpricking pain, but I will not use an aid like an old man. A broken old man.
“Kira, darlin’, can you do me a favor and put that in my room?” I want to douse it in gasoline and light it aflame on the W…E mat in a proper act of defiance and protest. I also can’t help but find irony in the fact that it’s been left on a mat that no longer says welcome. This cane is not welcome. The W…E mat just became the unwelcome mat.
She picks up the cane in one hand and the envelope in the other. “What about the letter? It has your name on it.” She’s looking at the handwriting, reading it.
“Just put it on my bed with the…” I can’t even say the word, “with that.” I point at the cane.
We spent the afternoon playing board games and watching movies on Netflix while it rained relentlessly outside.
The kids are in bed now. When I kissed and hugged them all goodnight, I saw three happy, content faces smiling back at me. I haven’t seen them all smiling like that in a while. Too long. Even Kai was grinning. And Kai only does something when he means it. The honesty in him is born in his bones and seeps out into the rest of him, which means every inch of him is truth. When he feels it, it’s projected. And today he was happy.
And that makes me happy.
I set aside the bitter.
Every last inkling of it.
Until I walk back to my room and see the cane lying on my bed.
And now I’m a jumble of emotions, pissed leading the charge. Someone’s made a judgment of me. I let my mind go so far as to wonder if it was Miranda, which is crazy because she lives in another state. Unfortunately, it’s not beneath her to rub my nose in something or to belittle me. She’s always been good at belittling. Jesus Christ, what did I ever see in her?
I tear open the envelope and as I read the note the flash of relief I had earlier reappears.
So does the embarrassment.
But not the anger.
Faith. Of course, it was Faith. It was left with good intention. Not ridicule.
Even so, I’m not using it. I’m stubborn. I may as well wear a sign around my neck that says I’m useless.
Putting it in the back of my closet, I bury it along with the letter behind a stack of magazines and a pile of shoes. And when I can no longer see it the relief vanishes into thin air and all that remains is embarrassment. It jabs at me. Taunts me. And I don’t know where it came from because it’s a new kind of embarrassment. A branch that grows on the embarrassment tree, but not a limb I thought I’d find myself climbing on. It feels shaky and thin, too small in diameter to hold my weight. It’s embarrassment tied to manliness and virility. Embarrassment tied to attraction and sexual prowess. It’s the realization that men with health issues, men that need things like canes to function, especially at my age, aren’t desirable and I feel like I’ve just lost something else to this disease. I feel like I’ve lost the ability to attract a partner, if and when I’m ever ready for that again.
I know when Faith used the word attractive she wasn’t being condescending. But maybe it’s the fact that she’s an attractive woman, who used the word attractive in her note, that set off the avalanche of epiphanies leading me down the road of imagined lonely, celibate, lifelong bachelor. I know she meant nothing by it. It’s just that sometimes a single word spurs thought. And thought can take the positive route when it comes to the fork in the road, or it can take the negative.
Lately, my thoughts always take a hard left and go negative.
Sometimes I’m irrational, I know I am, but even irrational thought feels very, very real when you’re in the middle of shit.
And smack dab in the middle of shit is exactly where I am.
Shit.