Scree

Long scree of pill bottles spilling over the tipped brim of the wicker basket, fifty or more, a hundred, your name on every one and under your name the brusque rune of instructions— which ones to take, how many, and often, on what days, with or without food, before or after eating, impossible toward the end to keep them all straight, not even with your charts, your calendars, the bottles ranged in sequence along the kitchen counter—you always so efficient, organized, never without a plan, even when planning had come down to this and nothing more, for there was still a future in it, though the future reached only from one bottle to the next, from pill to pill, each one another toehold giving way beneath you on the steep slope you never stopped struggling against, unable not to climb, and then, when climbing was impossible, not to try slowing the quickening descent. You had descended now, your body thinned to the machine of holding on, while I exhausted by the vigil, with all your medicine spread before me, looked for something, anything at all to help me sleep. To help me for a short while anyway not be aware of you, your gaunt hand clutching the guardrail, your eyes blind, flitting, scanning, it seemed, the air above them for their own sight, and the whimper far back in the throat, the barely audible continuous half-cry half- wheeze I couldn’t hear and not think you were saying something, though I couldn’t make out what. I wanted to sleep, I wanted if just for that one night to meet you there on that steep slope, the two of us together, facing opposite directions, I, because I wasn’t dying, looking down, desiring what you, still looking up, resisted, because you were.