When You Stop Looking and Start Seeing

In the morning, it thunders, a crack and a roll like the sound of a distant dam breaking, right as I wake up.

It has been hot for weeks—Missouri State Fair hot. Days of glaringly blue skies and roads wafting heat mirages between the fields beginning to brown at the edges like burning paper. School starts soon, and everyone is trying to wring the last sweetness from summer. Instead, everyone ends up escaping the sun and humidity that clings to you like a plastic shopping bag that the milk has sweated in.

I can see that it’s still dim outside, skies not yet allowing morning sun to pierce the storm.

Boyfriend has been up for god knows how long. He’s what the polite call an early bird. He is more considerate than my sweet but insistent black cat who likes to pounce on my head in the morning when my first alarm goes off. Instead, Boyfriend slips out of bed soft as a shadow, when my sleep is deepest, somewhere between five AM and heavy dreaming.

Reaching for my glasses in the half-light from the bathroom where he showers, I wonder if he is praying for a good outcome for his heart procedure today.

The thunder roars again, as if my nerves are right outside, hollering at me, and the windows rattle a touch.

I blink away my exhaustion at the sound of his shower-singing, realizing that he is as confident as he seems.

He is always what he seems.

I spent the first six months (at a minimum) of our courting looking for where his bodies were buried. I didn’t wonder if he was guilty of some sort of interpersonal crime. I just wanted to know which ones. I wanted to be prepared. Informed. Ready.

The fact that I couldn’t find the bodies made me persistently suspicious. He just smiled at me with genuine sweetness: me, his little black raincloud.

It was unnerving.

We have just passed our second anniversary together. I cannot claim bliss. I do not pretend to perfection. But I am still his little black raincloud, and he is still infuriatingly cheerful.

Even as I drive him to the hospital for another heart procedure under skies now gold and pink and still glowering gray in parts.  Even now, as my stomach churns and I turn up my catchiest pop music to drown out the sounds of my own doubts and insecurities, even now, he chatters as cheerily as a squirrel on a fencepost. He has not a worry in the world. It’s okay, I mutter to myself, I will worry for both of us.

There we are in my car—like the sky itself, fighting between the gold and the gray.

When I walk in, the cardiac waiting area is filled with women. No men sit and publicly worry while discussing the faith they put in Jesus. They do not tap at the puzzle left on a table as a shared distraction. They do not knit or sip tea or bond with others namelessly in chatter.

It’s just women in their fifties. And me.

So, I sit, and I worry with them. One woman is there for a daughter, several for a father, two for husbands.

The mother cannot stop talking. If a wall of words could heal her daughter’s weak and ill-working heart, that patient would have leapt from the table and danced. She talks as if the silence is lethal.

Oh how my heart aches in that room.

I dig through my purse when I am at the end of my aching, searching for a pen, and I come across my buckeye. The buckeye that I carry because of the Ozarker superstition that “no Ozarker ever died with a buckeye in his pocket.” I pull the buckeye out and I worry it with my fingers, squeeze it hard in my palm until my bones ache.

I put it back into my bag and say the kinds of silent prayers that are more like groans than words.

When I am told the procedure is over and successful, albeit a little more complicated than anticipated, and I can go join Boyfriend, I jump up and rush to him. There he lies in a hospital bed, face peaceful and damn near triumphant. As if his features could say, “I told you so” yet somehow remain angelic.

I want to be annoyed, but I’m too happy. The relief brims over as tears, and I kiss him. I look across his body, contained somewhere within a floppy, cornflower blue hospital gown. He looks pleased and totally unperturbed by the adventure. We will spend the night on the cardiac floor as they monitor his recovery.

I worry so much.

I pick at the world with my worrying. It has yet to protect me a lick, but it doesn’t stop me.

Growing up, hearing my sister’s ragged breathing at night, and later, her seizures, I worried that she would die in her sleep. I worried about that so hard, that when she finally did, some childish part of my brain believed I had caused her to die. I had known it was coming, saw it plain as day in my youthful fears. And yet, no amount of fear had stopped it.

I worried for the way things would feel, how things would change, when Dad would pass. I knew it was coming, saw it clearly, and grieved him so hard while he lived the last of his days in that cancer wing.

But again, the worrying was no protection, no comfort.

I just wanted to be prepared. Informed. Ready.

I have never wondered if life will do me dirty. I have just wanted to be on my feet when it does.

Boyfriend approaches the world so much kinder and softer than I do. Where I see potential suffering, he cocks his head with curiosity and looks with gentleness.

And yet, I think also of the way Boyfriend calls me “diligent” and “conscientious” and recognizes the small ways my worrying brings attention to tasks that should not be overlooked. I was prepared to overnight on the cardiac floor because I worried that the procedure would not be textbook.

I think of the morning, with the roll of thunder shaking the world. I think of the sky, somewhere between gray and gold. I think of the way the day was cooler, more pleasant for the rain.

Maybe, I decide, in the soft, beeping dark of the cardiac floor, I can be the little black raincloud sometimes. Maybe, I will even let him be my sunshine.

Gray and gold morning sky, reflected on a hospital rooftop.