Contentment

I wet the bed until I was around seven. I stare out at the nine o'clock sunset, the second floor window facing west, a sheer white curtain filtering the orange layer settling on top of the black forest line. My brother would sometimes laugh at me, to be expected; other nights he would fake sleep, be silent, as our mother changed the sheets and my clothes. I am the big spoon; my three-year-old son's head cradles in my right armpit, my bicep a soft pillow. I cried so much as a kid that my brother and sister thought it was a game. I cry as we pull ourselves farther away from the sun, the light ripped away like a blanket from the grappling baby. I spent nights taking my own pulse, inducing hyperventilation; most nights until I went to college, I thought I was going to die that night, yet waking brought little relief. I am my son's bed and blanket, and I think about how I was weak then and wonder where I will discover my current weaknesses. I once told a close friend, near high school graduation, that I did not think I would be alive past twenty-seven; we were halfway across the bridge, thirty seconds from my mother's house, but the silence lengthened the way it does when we vocalize difficult truths. I used to want to live forever, but now I am living that familiarity, torn between the fear of my death and the pain of witnessing my loved one's die. My father was gone for years before he died, even when he was present he was gone, and so were the men my mother gamed with. I squeeze my sleeping, snoring son because all of my happiness derives from the adrenaline of mortality, the knowledge that most of a sunset's beauty is its momentum towards an end. I was as delicate as a sandcastle. My son is dreaming of being a t-rex, a sea-a-suarus, smiling. I desire these two boys, these experiences merge, and that my son eats more that is ripe than I have. History does not beget either replication or revulsion because history is a river be dammed. My son will love puns, or he will not. He is three, and he sweats like a river. I sweat like a river, too. We joy in simple math, but fate and reoccurrence incurs a much more complicated equation.