Sticks and Stones

Preface

As I sat there, the flickering florescent lights making shadows on my skin, I couldn't help but wonder why I was here. What had led me down to this moment where I sat, the chilling bite of the rain only a thousandth of the coldness inside my own mind. When had my fate become sealed and the questionable maybes become absolute certainties? Had I ever had a choice and had he? Of the thousands of paths that could have diverged, why had we run headlong down one that was so clearly forged in fire and foolishness?

What was he to me? A friend, a stranger? Had I ever really known him and for that matter, had he ever really known me? And how many others, each further from the truth than myself, would be forever changed by the actions that drove us to this point? Could you really call this love: sitting, waiting, wondering what to say when the bleary eyed man, thin and pale from too many hours under those damn florescent lights, asks what the boy in the next room means to me? How do you fit the enormity of your soul into one short breath, which is further shortened by the pressure that crept into your chest five hours ago when this all began; The pressure that you feel may never leave again?

So you simply respond, "I love him." Which doesn't even come remotely close but allows the doctor to say he understands even though he couldn't hope to.

And then it happens, the moment when television dramas and middle-aged soccer mums' dog-eared novels claim the whole world jars into perspective. The point in which you forget the chill in your half asleep limbs and the dark red stains on your jeans that could be tomato sauce or cherry soda but aren't. The moment when the buzzing fog in your mind softens to allow in a single sentence.

"I'm sorry. There's nothing more we can do. It's all up to fate now."

So why when the gangly med student, eyes filled with the real sympathy of a doctor who's not yet grown callus to the faces that will continue on with one less piece of themselves, lays a hand on my still damp shoulder, do I feel nothing? Why is there no clarity, no sudden relief, no part of myself, however how small, that is plunged into the shaking sobs so commonly displayed as normal?

What is the true measure of love? The ability to grieve when they are slipping from your world, or the ability not to? To carry on as you wish they would or to stop and crumble under the weight of a world now impossibly dark and cold? And how would this measure be taken? Would one who mourned in death but was unfaithful in life be at level with one who was true in spirit but could not make the tears come?

Or, like so many have suggested, is love unmeasurable, at least in the normal sense of quantifying every action ever made. Is it instead shown through sitting, cold and shaking in a hospital waiting room? Through holding the small, sleeping boy whom you have come to love and whom does not yet know his world will be forever changed when he wakes? Or is love simply a feeling, caught and, with luck, held, until some unforeseen noose is looped around its throat. And you, the one forgotten, is left to remove its lifeless corpse from the branches that once held you both.