There is an uncomfortable stillness in being alone, and how the world seems to move in place around you. It can be dizzying, the crisp air that sends a chill down your throat and fills your lungs deep with a feeling of suffocation. I feel like this while I am sitting on the park bench, my body submitting to the curve of the dampened mossy wooden planks supporting me. My head tilts upwards to the Paperback Maples shedding leafy tears to the wintered grounds below where my feet meet with the unforgiving feeling of the cold dark earth. There is colour in being alone, when finely pointed blades of green grass poke their heads from under the snow to the white skies scattered between the arms of branches offering their leaves to the sun. There is the stark colour of winter.
There is also sadness in being alone, on the park bench. A sadness that I feel deeply. A sadness that asks why I wasn't there for him, and a sadness that asks me what if. When I sit on the bench, my body braced against the wood of trees that have fallen before, the spinning of the world around me flashes back to that Autumn day when I thought I had lost everything.
I can see the wire spoked wheels of the bicycles turning against the solid concrete. I can see his feet — the ones I once loved to stand on and dance — pushing softly against the pedals. I see it in slow motion, how the grey-blue car bounces as it comes around the corner behind him and how it doesn't slow down. I see its hungry wheels gently engulf the delicate frame of the silver bicycle, pulling it down into to the ground. And I see his body following. Slowly. Slowly to the ground, anticipating the crash of his head into the unforgiving rocks lining the side of the road.
What I don't hear is the screech of the car tires as it pulls away and disappears down the uneven road. What I don't hear is the scream of the little girl standing next to him with a trickling stream of red blood running down her leg from her knee chiseled with cuttings of loose gravel. I can't hear the sound of her feet hitting the ground as she runs over and collapses at the head of her father. I can't feel the touch of her little fingers as they try to pry open the drawn eyelids of her father lying on the ground. And I can't hear her screams.
I am thankful.
I am thankful for the strangers who came running to him, arms outstretched holding an ugly orange woollen blanket speckled with strings of purple.
I am thankful for the warmth of the blanket that held him tightly, stopping everything from breaking apart into pieces like the dry snow that falls from the sky. The kind of snow that you try so desperately hard to hold together, but that just crumbles through the cracks in your hands.
I am thankful for the plethora of tubes and the whine of monitors and waiting room seats. For the ability to watch him heal and the ability to feel safe again.
But at some point I must open my eyes back up to the winter sky above me, and this makes me sad. I am sad because of the bounce of the car as it came around the bend. I am sad because of the thrust of the car against the bicycle as it pushed the father into the ground. I am sad because i see the eyes of the little girl crying over her father for in the hope that someone would hear her. I am sad because of the life now permanently changed and the father that will never return.
Sadness is unfamiliar and sadness is scary when he rages and yells and when he throws things and just stops and stands to look at the ground, scared and ashamed of his own rage. Sometimes I just have to stand in a corner or lock myself in a room and wait for the sadness to be over, but sometimes it doesn't end and that is where it is time to say goodbye to the happiness that turned sad.
