I find one of your old contact lenses in the bath mat. Feel it under my big toe. A tiny ship. A coracle. Netted by some pubes and fibers. Has it really been that long since I shook out the mat? You hated its shag. Said it felt like stepping out of the bathtub onto oatmeal or guts. Like you were sinking. You’d wanted an outdoor rug instead. Something stabby and high-traffic, once your nerve endings were finally shot. I never got around to getting one, of course. But honestly, I liked that you had to grip my shoulder while we toweled you dry together, while you struggled to curl your toes into the pile to steady your wobbly legs, your beautiful rocking penis. I liked being your anchor.
The contact looks only a little puckered. I wonder if it can be rehydrated. ChatGPT probably says don’t even think of it.
Those last weeks when everything felt soaking wet to your touch. Sheets, gowns, foam foot wedges. You didn’t believe me when I told you to stop fretting; they were bone dry. I didn’t believe you when you said you could make me wet again, if I’d let you. Down to my bones, right there in room 204A. You insisted your muscle memory was still fully functional. “Come on board,” you said, patting the space beside you, but with an odd rebound, like the hospital bed was an ocean and you didn’t want to splash me too hard.
I hold up the contact to my eye with tweezers. Little glass-bottomed boat. I have an urge to insert it. See how you saw, for a few blinks, before it does damage. As it is, I wake up with barnacles crusting my eyes from crying in my sleep. As it is, I’m not hydrating enough. I’m losing faster than I’m replenishing.
I drop the lens in the toilet. Flush it down. Make a wish it sinks to some ocean floor and becomes a bed for a wee, layabout crustacean.
Before sleep, I remember your hand on the ball of my shoulder. The gear-stick pulses, small adjustments. The marvel of feeling your touch less where it was than where it traveled to.
I try to find my way to that spot now, like I do every night. Along the trenches my bones make, sightless and sluggish as a bottom dweller. Always almost there.