You’ve heard the old lovers’ cliché: “I don’t know where you end and I begin”? I don’t buy it. When my husband’s life ended — that’s when I didn’t know where mine began.
We’d been there, on the love front: writing letters back and forth in a fever, kissing envelopes, me pressing my lips to his stamp, imagining those molecules of his saliva entering me. I remember running through train stations in Europe, believing I would finally be whole once I was in his arms. We’d lie in bed all day listening to Miles Davis. Once, we took turns being each other’s air: he cupped his mouth over my nose and filled my lungs, and I inhaled, letting his breath fill me. Then he let me do the same to him.
