Relief!

Ella's image swam a hundred feet below me in the icy waters of the golden ravine. The craggy hills smothered me on either side as I watched. Swimming on her back, her gaze made its way from the water’s surface and deep into my soul, jarring a memory of the last time we’d seen each other.

She lay in the metal-framed bed holding my hand and asked me to take care of her children, to love her always, to make amends with her mother. I shivered in the all-white room with its steel-encased windows and looked out onto the silver city. My feet ached from standing for hours in hard shoes on a tile floor and the fluorescent lighting above mocked my weary eyes. I knew the tile and lighting held no special regard for bed-side promises. The tile and the lighting could bring this scene to an end any moment it chose and sweep Ella away from the bed before her she finished asking her promises and I agreed to honor them.

But the room did allow me to make these promises, seeing to it that her children were well cared for, living with their gay uncle in Portland; speaking to her mother in Salem, conveying her regret they hadn’t spoken since ‘35, enduring her bitter tears of recrimination; and loving her. Always loving her.

How best could I love her, I wondered, as I gazed at the image swimming before me, a hundred feet down from the golden gate? A moment later I was free, floating through the air, making my way from the vermilion-clad bridge to the waters beneath, reaching my Ella in a calm void that was all-enveloping, all-enclosing.