Dreams of Tea Cake

"Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches."

I'm reading Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time since I met my own Tea Cake, and I find myself shaking as I begin. I had to face that my Tea Cake was dead, too, only in a different way than Janie's died, recently. Again. Because I finally faced that he was done being my Tea Cake long ago. But I'm still haunted by Tea Cake's ghost.

I was reading Yellow Raft in Blue Water earlier today, and there's a beautiful scene where Aunt Ida tells Willard Pretty Dog about her sadness in an effort to let him know that she understands his pain. "So, without planning it or thinking, I told him. I laid my life on the table—Clara and Papa and Mama and Pauline; Christine, the lies, the loneliness—for Willard to examine and see if it was bad enough to suit him. As I listened to my own story, I lost the control of its interpretation. I heard it as a tale on the radio, so sad it deserved applause and a trip to Florida. Unhappiness was the only thing that Willard valued, and as I admitted mine, I put myself in his broken hands. When I was done, I raised my palms to my face and breathed into them. My skin was cool and smelled of onion. The wood of Willard's chair crackled as he leaned toward me. His fingers tugged at mine, left my face exposed. I waited, hardly breathing, my eyes closed. Then I felt his touch, light as fog, upon my cheek.”

And I remembered that night during my first visit when he got me talking about Chris and I started crying from a well deep within that I didn't know existed and that has since re-submerged. Sometimes I think I could use another gut-wrenching cry or throat-gurgling laugh like the ones I shared with him, but I know I need to save them to share with someone who loves me in the same way. It will be worth the wait. But I do miss it.