choices

I can get married tonight. I will get married tonight. I only have to choose between three men. i go to the place I am to meet them, a casual bar of sorts, open down to the slope of a hill and a curving street below. They are brought in for me shortly after I arrive. When I see them, my first thought is that they are all handsome, one boyish, one nicely rumpled, the last: just average, but, by any standard, appealing. The second thing I notice is that they are all in wheelchairs. Two of them, aware of my concern, stand up to prove they could stand up (to possibly change a light bulb if it was above them) but they can't walk to me, or move further. They sit and I meet them, get closer to notice one's chestnut curly hair and his tight grip on the armrest. The boyish one is more beautiful. Later, he will tell me a story of a trauma in his life, unrelated to his paralysis and when he tells me I will notice he has a kind of clear, glass mold around his face, the lips of which move as he talks.

After my initial meeting, I go to the bar. I don't know if I'm drinking. But I'm stalling and don't know how to begin to decide, how I could possibly manage a future pushing a grown man in a wheel chair, knowing too, that perhaps within a year my own mother could be in a wheel chair. I stall and stall. The bartender woman knows I won't decide and plots a new graph for me. She carves some fast diagram on the bar and it ends in a letter - the first letter of the woman who will bartend next, who is a psychic.

Much time passes. And nothing happens. The guys are waiting. They are patient. I don't know if they are hopeful. They are like dogs in the pound; the decision is mine to make - some care, even by someone who knows nothing about it, would be better than none.

I see the next bartender is really, really focused as she washes a plate. I try to join her in that focus as I know that, as her hand is moving in circles over the plate, she is connecting with my sticking point, my reluctance, my self-ignorance. When she is done, I ask her if she is psychic and she says, I am - though nothing further comes of it.

It is at this point I go back to the men and talk to them. I see the lovely one inside his protective barrier, see that, though I could listen better, I could never actually be able to get close to him. The other, I find out, has cerebral palsy, and nervous twitches move his head from front to back, up and down, in a kind of yes.no.no.yes kind of nod.

More waiting. More time gone by. Any chance for triumphant celebration - lost.

Two of the men have gone to sleep, uncomfortably in their chairs. The other, the dark and romantically rumpled one, is looking for a berth. He finds none he can stretch out in and heads down the hill and to the street. I catch up with him later in the night. Some how, in the mean time, he had told me, he has advanced dementia. When I see him, he is out of his chair, almost literally baying at the moon, blocking traffic, his hair and arms - wild.

I go back to the bar and sit higher up on the slope on some steps. The bartender sits below me, doesn't see me and talks about the poor men, sleeping in their chairs all night. She is surprised when I tap her shoulder, afraid I'd overheard. I said, "I know. I didn't know. I thought they might be comfortable. I didn't know what to do."

And she said, "Are you, then, simply unkind?"