by Madison Bowman
In the beginning, it was only music. That first day, I stretched my legs out on the cool tile floor of the empty chapel and watched his right hand flit over nylon strings while his left hand stroked at the neck of his cheap guitar.
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He touched me only once in the first nearly year and a half that I knew him; it was a handshake, firm and brief and introductory.
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Once when making a curry, I spent minutes mincing the celled flesh of a hot pepper, and for hours afterward, when I scratched my nose or brushed back my hair with those pepper-soaked fingers, any skin I touched turned fiery and produced a heat of its own. The second time David and I touched, it felt like that.
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Years earlier, I had followed a whim to a skydiving center, signed up for a jump, and found myself, almost as though I had just woken up there, crouching parallel to the open door of a light aircraft. I was not alone; my instructor was strapped onto my back, holding me in position. Do we jump? I yelled over the whoosh of the wind. We let ourselves fall, he responded, and tipped our bodies over the threshold, headlong into the rush. When I married David, and the question was asked of me, I said Yes, I said, my voice cracking like a beaten bell. And again: Yes.
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We married young, with faith-filled confidence and perhaps optimistic naiveté; then quickly we lost our nerve. We argued and second-guessed and wondered if we were a poor match, if hearts should be steadier. On holiday in Paris, city of lovers, we fought. “Did we jump into this too quickly?” I asked him, tracing the damp circles where raindrops had fallen on my sleeve. “No,” he said. “But I think we’re too quick to get scared by the weight of it.”
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When we returned from Paris, David took job in San Francisco. We packed our possessions into our car and drove to a new ocean across a vast landscape. Weeks later, in a muffled morning full of fog, we walked straight west from our apartment until we reached the sea. Then we looked out on that bay of moving marble — the shift and the sway, the drift and the drown — and down we sank like anchors into the sand. “Has it been only a year?” he said.
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The day my son was born the midwife knelt at my shivering side and pressed her palm to the swell of my belly. This is the labor, she said. This is your work. From this you emerge a mother. I walked circles in the gathering dusk, traced prayers across the floor of a room made holy by the presence of an ancient anguish. We made our descent together, my baby and I; we wound our way down from Eden. A time to be born, says Ecclesiastes — oh, how we long to be born! Bones shift to make way, flesh rips, my body becomes pure yield, and I am delivered.
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My son was born and my body, having worked so diligently at openness, refused to close. My blood poured out and out, I wept blood, I leaked life, and the nurse pressed our baby into David’s arms and hurried him out into the hall where, he later told me, he heard them yelling we’re losing her!, and watched our son’s blinking and bewildered eyes.
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Our boy falls asleep only in our arms, his ear pressed to one of our chests, a pulse as his balm. As he drifts into sleep, we wind slowly around the room, lit by pinstripes of dusk through the blinds’ slats. We sing to soothe and to pass the time until his sleep is deep enough that we can ease him into the bassinet next to our bed without waking him before tiptoeing out of the room. While he is sleeping, we move gently, silently, speaking in whispers rooms away. We lie on the couch, pressed together, remembering our lives before him and before each other, how easy they were, how alone. We are in awe, of each other, of how existence comes about from a touch, how we are permitted these acts of creation, these eager leaps.
Madison Bowman is a writer in New York; this essay is drawn from a longer work called Love: a Chiasmus.