He spoke to me; I let him speak. I knew what it felt like to have words, ideas, buried so deeply inside it felt like agony to finally dig them up and find a way to spew them from your mouth. The way he was speaking, the narrative he was stitching together in my head (the math he was trying to make me do—just how old was this guy?) felt like cold, cold chips of ice spitting from his lips, cold and frozen like the rest of him—like he wanted to be, I guess, because a cold thing is a numb thing, and it sounded like there were lots of painful wounds on the inside that hadn’t quite healed over, that needed that little numbing agent to make it easier to open your eyes the next morning.

I had a taste of that, myself. And I call it a taste because it wasn’t a thing that I had been grappling with as long as Lee certainly had. My tragedies, in hindsight, were few compared to whatever he had stacked up against him—and I was beginning to accept them, and let my demons sleep with me instead of spending sleepless nights trying to fend them off. I had stopped fighting a while ago. But I wasn’t sure, in that moment, if that means I had been defeated.

I laid there and listened to him (He began to die three years later. A year after that, he was all but destroyed—and yet he remains, like a skin I can't slough off—) and I kept breathing cuz I wanted my heart to keep pumping, to keep myself warm, to keep him warm because even though cold can keep you from drowning in your own terror, it was still gonna make you sick. I breathed in his scent evenly and took in the cadence of his voice and I wondered to myself—

Without him, I do not know how to be.

—I wondered, what could I say to him? Should I even say anything, at all? Who was I to offer advice, especially as I laid there in his shadow? Was I still some kid fumbling blindly, trying to find my own way in the world—or had I grown into something beyond that, and was it okay for me to feel that way? Would I be arrogant to think I had grown at all? In the eyes of my Pa, wasn’t I still just an infant?

(But I’ll always be an infant anyway, that wasn’t even an argument there, I was trapped in the perpetual state of babyhood—)

The stars were beginning to melt a little bit, just a little, as the sky seemed to think about shifting into daytime. We both laid there and our breathing made a steam around us and I let it float around and above as I realized there was a question forming in the back of my throat. I hesitated—was it wisdom? Was it impudence? If I stuttered would I ruin the moment? I opened my mouth and I let it out as small as I could: “Do you want to be without him?”