A song in the sun
It was dark when we rushed to the hospital. Tears flowed down your face, from an eye that wouldn’t close. Half your face wasn’t moving.
We didn’t know what was happening. I tried to give you warmth I didn’t feel. “Let’s go somewhere when you get better,” I said. “Let’s go to New Zealand.” You’d dreamed of going, but Aotearoa had always been out of reach. Someday, I’d thought.
It was Bell’s Palsy, a condition that causes facial paralysis. It has no known cause, no known cure. It just needs time. It took you six months to recover. When you finally smiled with both sides of your face, I thought we were done, and I locked my promise away.
I’m being practical, I thought. The little money we had was a safe we’d built against uncertainty.
“You promised,” you reminded me. I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say yes. “You promised,” you whispered. “I know,” I did the math and kept quiet. “You promised,” you said, like somebody who’d waited in a room longer than she should have.
So I bought the tickets. The lock cracked. The numbers broke.
The first town in New Zealand was grey and dusty. Fog between the mountains, hiding the peaks. I sat in the motel, wondering if we should have come.
But then we drove deeper into the country and the fog began to lift. We walked through moss-covered bush on the way to Roaring Billy. We drank deep from the crisp air of the Matukituki Valley.
One afternoon, the fields of Mount Cook were lit by the setting sun. You sang the theme from one of my favourite movies, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the song that plays when Nausicaä dances on top of the golden fields. My hands moved to my camera, then stopped. You finished singing and we walked back to the hotel.
Mount Cook, New Zealand. May 3, 2016.