Empty Spaces
Lost to Time
She loved the kiss of the sea, how it covered her body in comforting wholeness. It was her got to place, when the world was too much to live in, when her shattered pieces began to fall apart. The sea, like mother so many years ago, was her forever comforting home. Till of course she met him.
He was like a breath of fresh air, a window in her other wise simple life, to a world of color and magic. Like her, he marveled at the sea and pleasured in its caress. Her go to place, became their go to place. After all, he had made the whole place brighter. He was all she wanted from a man physically, but the love blossomed in her heart the more she got to know his personality and his aspirations. She fell. She fell hard.
He danced to the tunes of determination and carried the never die spirit as his companion through life. She had played hard to get when first they met, though she was immediately taken by his looks. It was how he chased that made her want to know him, it was how he loved that stole her heart from her chest. Like thumb and nail, they spent every little time they had together. She liked to think she was to him the companion to accompany him through life. And indeed she was.
What she failed to account for was that life is a treacherous and fickle thing, and that its generosity and cruelty stand equal. It never gives more than it takes and vice versa. And for all that it had given, it returned not so long after to collect what it was due. After all, for true love, 45 years of blissful marriage and kids was not nearly enough time to share.
Before her very eyes, she watched him fade away, the light in his eyes slowly being extinguished. She fought to stop it, she cried and prayed. But in the end, she read a beautiful eulogy and wept a whole bunch.
Like her darling husband forever whispering in her mind, she soon only heard her children’s voices on the other end of a phone, they’d grown to be important people. Her grand kids were so cute, but their presence was rarer than a blue moon. She was like the sea now, loved and visited, but always alone, dancing to a tune her alone understood.
When she was frail and 6 feet bound, she called to her children, and that will be the first she had seen some of them in years. Like the sea, she offered kisses of comforting wholeness. She would look at each in their eyes and say a prayer for them, that they may never know her loneliness and that the future, what ever it may be, would be kind to them.
They pleaded with her to stop, they promised to be around often as though they were the masters of their lives. As though they could alter a single plan already laid out by the cosmos. They spoke because they couldn’t see, but she did, and that was okay. For the duty of the aged is to caution the young.
She felt the world pass her by, she saw the world morph and become. She saw ideas turn into reality, she saw the impossible come to life. In her time, she had seen the wonders of the world, tasted of its pleasures and burns. She had known love and family, she had seen the genesis of so many, and conclusions too. She knew, with every fiber of her being, that her time had come to leave the stage, for while the young marveled in the wonders of innovation and growth, she mourned for a world she’d known, dying before her eyes. For at the apex of innovation, growth and change, she found herself surrounded by empty spaces.
Ngang God'swill N. 2021
