The Mountain Between Us

by Charles Martin

Marry the man who’s going to walk with you through the next fifty or sixty years. Open doors, hold your hand, make your coffee, rub lotion on the cracks of your feet, put you up on a pedestal where you belong. Is he marrying your face and your bottle-blond hair, or will he love you when you look like whoever you’re going to look like in fifty years?”

So much of what I am, he made. Forged it in me. I know that. But Dad used pain to rid me of pain. Leaving me empty and hurting. You poured in you and filled me up. For the first time, I felt no pain. You gave me the one thing he never did. Love, absent a stopwatch.

I figured I could go a week and still function without food, provided we had water, but after that I’d be so weak I’d be no good to anyone. Years ago, when I saw that movie Alive, it grossed me out. Sitting there staring at Grover, it grossed me out more. I wasn’t eating him. Having said that, if all options were honestly on the table, and it meant our living versus our dying, there was always the dog. Problem was, he’d only feed us once. Maybe the first time his size was ever an advantage to him. Had he been a Lab or a Rottweiler, I’d have thought more seriously about it.

living with a broken heart is living half dead, and that doesn’t mean you’re half alive. It means you’re half dead. And…that’s no way to live.”

We’d caught a break, and doing so had pushed back the hopelessness that was crowding in, choking the life out of us.

Broken people just need piecing back together. For so long I’d carried the pieces of me. Every now and then I’d drop one like a breadcrumb. So I could find my way home.