When Elizabeth leaves, I get all sappy and kind of sad. I held out for about a week this time by reading at night, but now I'm really noticing her absence. It's a weird sort of sadness that settles over me when she is gone, and it is deepened by music. Slow, heavy music becomes more appealing at such times and all music seems to be more meaningful and heavier. This auditory weight seems to take on mass and settle into my chest cavity, widening the absence. Right now, I'm listening to that kind of music.

In a way, this feeling is strangely enjoyable. It is similar to that sadness that drove me as a teenager to get on my bicycle and ride for miles along the only paved road that ran out of the village I grew up in and then, miles from my house, just as night was setting in, get off my bike and yell out the name of the girl I had a crush on as if she could hear me and feel my longing. Or the feeling I would get as a teenager that would draw me out of the house to wander, again at dusk, the dusty fields that bordered the Ute reservation, wondering if there really might be an edge where the world drops off into nothingness. Or the time I drove all night from Mesa, Arizona to Colorado because I had a feeling my dad was going to die. He didn't die, but I had many invaluable conversations with my parents because I thought I might never see one of them again. I also climbed onto the roof of their house and watched a sunrise from up there; it was a fiery orange and yellow and to watch it felt strangely like listening to heavy music, like listening to a poem I could feel but not quite understand.

At times like these, my mind inevitably turns toward death. I wonder what it would feel like to lose her and the unborn baby and maybe even Sonora. The emptiness in my chest grows and the weight gets heavier. My arms feel as if they will sink through the chair, through the floor, stopping only at the earth. I picture my inner self falling, collapsing, and then lying like a slug on the ground, letting everything else go, letting emotion spill out like water from a burst balloon. I don't allow myself to fully imagine these possibilities because I don't want to feel that bad and I know that, until it happens, I will never have any idea really how bad that would feel. These thoughts come about any time Elizabeth and I are apart for more than a few days. But as I said, I don't mind this feeling so much because it reminds me of the connection we have. It is a sadness that reminds me that our separation is only temporary, the pain mostly of the imagined sort.

And it carries with it a certain creative energy that makes me want to at least partially see past the superfluous, as happened the time I went to visit my parents in Colorado. In a way, it is cleansing and re-focusing. Part of me wants to get up from wherever I am, whatever I am doing, and go to her, to wander through fields at dusk or ride a bike down highways until I get to her; it's like some kind of weird magnet that my conscious mind is only partially aware of, something I can feel, something my self can feel but that I don't totally understand, though understanding it isn't important somehow.

I'm going to describe an experience that is unabashedly cheesy, but that ties into what I'm feeling right now. A few years ago, Elizabeth and I went to listen to a well-established author read from one of his books. The reading was held in a building that had a lot of artwork--paintings and sculptures--scattered about. Before the reading, we viewed and pondered on the art works, admiring some of them. At one point, I scanned the whole room, took it all in. There was one image that really stood out to me in that survey, but I couldn't remember which one. I just knew that I found it to be beautiful, sublime, and moving, and it somehow made me feel almost giddy. I re-surveyed the room, trying to find the piece of art that had made me feel that way, but I couldn't find it, so I went through the catalog of images in my mind. I realized with some delight that the image that had so moved me was Elizabeth's face as she stared at a work on the wall; I had unconsciously swept her up in my survey of the art collected there and she had made all the other works pale.

Since she has been gone, along with the feeling of sadness and weight, I've been having feelings similar to the Elizabeth-as-art feeling. I might see a photo of her and for a brief instant, before my mind fully recognizes her, I will feel a rush of positive associations with the image. The same thing happened when I saw a picture of my daughter this morning, a picture in which she is making a funny face. Before it registered that I was looking at Sonora, I had a flash of emotion: love, fun, protectiveness, adoration; in the next instant, when I realized I was looking at my daughter, I had a sudden urge to chase her around the house and then swing her on a blanket and toss her onto the couch, to read her a book and teach her a few more German words. But then I realized she and Elizabeth were gone and I stored that urge away; I will retrieve it when they return.