The Robbery

How long have I been watching without him?

Decades.

The world is cold. My world is cold.

I watched often and spoke rarely. The world was large from my perspective, at the heels of your feet. It was pretty too with its big blue skies and sunny days. I saw more of the sun than you did, didn't I? The sun and the moon. Bright and brighter.

My life was a collection of bright moments, headlights shining on his body in the cold winter, watching her leave. I said goodbye last. I touched her last. But he saw her through the windshield when I was already gone.

I sat underneath him at the beach. Walked alongside him at sunset. I lived in all sorts of ways below and about him, just never above. And never warm.

The cold is a comfort to me. Not something to be avoided but simply the way that it is. He is warm and I am cold. He is bright, corporeal. And I am dark, intangible.

Living this way was always something of a leash, but a pleasant one. It was a habit. Sitting at his feet is as easy for me as slipping on a polo and heading out the door. Just as comfortable. I enjoy the act of looking up at him. I've been doing it a long time.

I follow the elegant dress shoes to work, watch him slip out into the hall to toss down a bag of chips unbothered, and sneak home late with him, popping up between streetlights. I count the distance to home by them. One streetlight, then two, ten, seventeen. Porch lights.

Kitchen light and clean grey tiles.

Dinner time.

He likes soup in the morning when sunrise casts me under the table. Most days he takes his sandwich outside at lunch, even when the stormclouds rolling in turn me grey and thin. Dinner is at the table, under warm lights and sometimes, summer sunsets where I sit behind him and stare at his back.

We go to the park on weekends. I sway at his feet as he moves through the gentle sequence of tai-chi. The grass holds me. This place, between the grass fields and the little clump of manicured trees and towering sycamores, this is the place I like to watch the seasons change.

Summer grass makes me warm, fuzzed about the edges as sweat drips from him to me and I catch a taste of him, a brief glimpse of his DNA. Am I always reaching for him? Or is he always reaching for me?

Autumn and the refusal to wear a jacket. Long sleeves hug him tightly and don't disrupt my shape but the jeans do. They are welcome. He looks at home in them.

Stark winter light, the kind that blinds his eyes and gives me the square outline of sunglasses. I'm in a different place than the summer, far from him instead of underfoot. It reminds me that half the time I lead him. It's a split job, isn't it, walking around the world? I lead him, he leads me, and sometimes we go nowhere together.

Our routine was anything but clockwork but it moved like blood, constant. It hummed with steady purpose, steady hands, steady gait. He was steady. And I was too.

I was glad to follow him. We travelled, saw waterfalls and flowers that opened only under moonlight. Their petals shimmered white, pearlescent in a way I couldn't fathom. The world around them was black in a way I knew. Did he understand the flowers? Did the darkness confuse him the way the light confused me?

Who knew?

He didn't spend his idle time thinking but moving.

I spent three decades, and some change, chasing after him. Better, I spent that time with the sound of his heavy steps chasing me, pushing me forward into a new world I didn't recognize. I've reached mountain peaks before him and descended last and he let me. He knew me.

We were silent friends. The kind you can sit beside on a couch and say nothing. I wasn't always at his feet but sometimes at his side, sometimes just next to his arm as he clacked away at work. And I liked it there. He liked me there, dim but present. Silent but always at hand. A body double. A link to productivity. A path away from loneliness.

Because he would have been lonely. Terribly so.

Darkness was a friend to him. I was a friend to him and no man should be friendly with a shadow. Most don't even recognize them but there were times, plenty of them, where he spoke to me. Idly shared the best parts of his days. Sometimes around midnight, he would turn on all the lights and cry for her.

And I would listen.

Our days grew longer. He stopped sleeping long hours and I could no longer watch as he gently woke to no alarm clock and open curtains but maybe it was better that way. He did more tai chi. I became limber, fluid, capable.

There was something absurdly captivating about watching him.

He was tall, like me, and unassuming looking with mousy brown hair and grey eyes. He liked to lounge. On weekends, weekdays, and warm afternoons, he slid out to his patio with a book and the intention of reading but only ever managed a handful of pages before dropping back into his chair and falling asleep.

I watched him then too.

I watched the easy rise and fall of his chest. The heartbeat pounding softly against his neck. The book flopped on the ground, covering my hand as though it was my turn to enjoy his life.

He looked peaceful.

It was a nice look on him.

That was then.

This is now.

He's jittery, moving me around more than normal. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth down the work hallway. Up to the top floor, down to the basement. Bright white fluorescents and dim yellow interior lights, warm. Mimicking sunlight. It's all so well-lit that I was constantly between his feet, like a dog in hiding. It isn't natural.

The natural ease in his movements was gone. All that tai chi for nothing.

He tripped over air, knocked his shoulder against corners, and kept having to catch his breath despite hardly doing enough to warrant it.

And I watched.

Hallway. Office. Basement. Hallway. Stairwell. Basement. Stopped in front of the TV. Static.

Running.

Something was wrong.

I had been with him since his father first held him up to the window to overlook the sunny summer day he was born and never had this man run this way. It was fast as a bullet and as purposeful too. Our arms pumped in time, not a second of delay as he burst through the door of the building into the bright light of midday.

It was a breath of fresh air but he didn't pause to enjoy it.

Neither of us did.

If I had known that the night before would have been our last, I would have looked at his silhouette against the moonlight longer. I would have appreciated the way his slender neck craned toward the sky. If I'd known that was the last night I was going to sit, chained at his feet, I would have held on tight and simply swallowed the sight.

We ran faster, toward a daycare he visited often where his niece liked to color. Faster, faster, faster.

And then a dead stop.

Arms dangled at our sides, head tilted toward the city as something whistled.

I looked too.

The sun had decided to rise in the middle of the city but it wasn't slow like his weekend mornings, the ones where he woke before dawn and sat outside. It was quick like a snap of the fingers. Like breaking a bone.

It all went white.

White as burning sand on a midday beach.

White as fireworks booming across the sky.

White as lightning.

White as the deepest corner of hell.

When it was just the sun again, when the white flash and the heat had passed, he was gone. The soul of him was flung out into the ether by the flash and I remained.

I remained.

No more Sunday naps on the patio. No more watching him as he slept in the filtered light streaming through his windows. No more looking as he hinged at the waist and laughed.

He was gone.

The concrete around me had gone bone white. The world, a different color than I had ever seen. Grey and white and black with a splattering of fire red, it was charred to its core, robbed of everything but its shadows.

In the middle of my belly, I held a pile of ash and a few shards of bone. The last pieces of my best friend, the man I followed around like a dog. The man who made me happy to do so.

How long would I have to stay here without him?

Somewhere the burned branch of a tree stripped of its leaves broke and fell to the ground.

Why was he ripped from me?

The birds he loved to watch were silent.

I was a consequence of him.

The sunlight wasn't out. It was behind a thick layer of clouds and I shouldn't have been able to see it. I shouldn't have been able to feel the rain as it began to fall. But I could.

He was gone.

And I was all that remained.