Memoir / Chapter 10
Softly,
I will leave you
Softly.
For my heart would break,
if you should wake
and see me go.
So I leave you,
Softly.
Long before you'll miss me--
Long before your arms
can beg me stay
for one more hour,
or one more day.
After all the years,
I can't bear the tears
to fall,
so softly, so softly
As I leave you then.
I will leave you then.
"Lois. Lo-is. Wake up, honey. Wake up now."
Clark was gently shaking me awake. Our room was dark, moonlight filtering wanly through the shuttered windows.
"Lois, you were crying in your sleep. Is everything alright?" He brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes.
"Fine. I'm fine."
"Honey, why were you crying?"
"Must've been a bad dream. I don't remember." I lied. I'm not sure why. I know I could have shared it with him—I just didn't want to encumber him with one more thing. In truth, I still remembered part of the dream and the fragments of a song. Leah and another friend of ours, Bobby, were Sales Executives at a large insurance company and they were very competitive, but they were good friends. Sometimes, as friends will do, they would fight. She shared with me their strategy for making up. They would get together and get drunk and listen to really, incredibly sad songs. They would cry and make up. It sounded almost barbaric to me, that they would subject themselves willingly to such torture, but she assured me that it was very cathartic. They had a play list and the final piece was always "Softly, As I Leave You." The Elvis version of it—complete with spoken introduction by Elvis about the origin of the song. Well, even without booze it was a tear-jerker of a song. I don't know why the song was on my mind—I hadn't heard it in years. Not since Leah had passed away.
"You sure?"
"I'm fine. Really."
His face was obscured by shadow, but I knew he was searching my face to see if I was holding back. At length, I broke the silence:
"Remember my friend Leah?"
"Of course, how could I forget?"
"She had a theory about aging."
"Why does that not surprise me? Didn't she have a lot of theories." She did, that was true. He didn't mean anything bad by it. She was something of a genius—but not in the mad-scientist-I-want-to-rule-the-world sort of way that we were so accustomed to in our lives. I think she always knew that Clark was Superman, but she never said anything. You could tell her anything. She never judged—just listened.
"Anyway," I continued, "she thought that the human brain was like a computer. Computers could be purged and cleaned, but as they got older they slowed down and then sometimes they would stall and windows would pop up unexpectedly when you didn't request the file. She said that she thought it must be like that as people got older—their brains were so full of information and memories that sometimes the information just popped up randomly."
"So, are you telling me that it's time to delete your cookies?"
"Yeah, something like that." I smiled at him in the darkness.
He kissed me tenderly. In all our years together, I've never grown tired of kissing Clark. Sometimes his kisses were urgent and primal and other times adoring, still other times playful. The one constant was that he always made me feel special and treasured. Tonight, it seemed especially so. His hands caressed my face, his thumb wiping a tear that had leaked from the corner of my eye.
"You sure you're okay?" It was barely a whisper as his lips brushed the corner of my mouth, the words rumbling from his chest. My heart contracted and fresh tears stung the back of my eyes. How was it that the strongest man on the planet could be so gentle and so passionate?
"Yes, I'm sure." I managed to croak out breathlessly. "Clark?"
"Hmm?" He replied as he threaded the fingers of his left hand in my right hand. His hands were warm, as always—in contrast to the coolness of the wedding ring he had been wearing continuously for more than a century.
"You know I love you?" He pulled my hand to his lips and placed gentle, downy soft kisses on the pad of my thumb and my wrist.
"I had a feeling you did. I'm glad you finally told me." He teased me. Then his mood shifted slightly and he said in earnest: "Lois, I will never stop loving you."
My mouth went dry. As I said before, he always made me feel cherished, but never more than in those moments. He kissed me again, so tenderly, so reverently, I thought my heart might shatter with the emotions that he was conjuring. I felt beautiful and like my heart was breaking all at once—it was as if he was making love to me for the first time, but likely, this would be the last.