Writing the Book

My husband and I had a joke of sorts. Or maybe it was wishful thinking/hoping on our parts. He loved to read the little essays I would write him and put in his lunch box. But he was easy to wow, because he hated to write, himself. I was always tinkering with this short story or that. Getting upset when my creative writing prof said I was more of a poet than a writer of prose. But, I do/did see more of the poet in my own writings after that class. My penchant for the run on sentence, abstract breaks, random ideas bouncing in...and, always, the incomplete sentences. But hey, that is what editors are for. But, I am getting off track. I had started a novel (interestingly enough, it was titled "I Promise Not to Laugh During the Seance" until I began this blog, and stole the title. It has sat on my computer for years. It has started and stopped, been deleted, recrafted and abandoned for months at at time. It was difficult for me to keep it together long enough most days to get anything down because,as mentioned, I procrastinate. I have so many memories of things I didn't get done that now wound me, because he asked me often about them.

And then there is the book. We would go out and look at houses. Sometimes they were slightly above our means. He would look at me and say,"When are you going to write that book?" with a wink. I would dither and say something noncommittal about how many chapters, writers block, these things take time, the kids... etc... Over about 10 years, we would sort of joke about this. It was always "When are you going to write that book?"

He will never ask me that again. Today, I realized I never will/can write that book. It belonged to him/us. I begin to think that I would/will have to completely reinvent myself in order to survive. And so, In a second goodbye/funeral/realization of loss, I called up the book one more time

and

I hit delete.

And I hope, somewhere, he is reading the book that I had already dedicated to him. The book that, using fictional characters designed for him to know that they were us, detailed a 2 decades long love story. A pouring out of all that I felt for him. A sort of collection of the things I had written on cards he had read, notes I had sent. They are gone from me now. Just as he is. And it was another rending, but I couldn't look at it sitting there anymore.