We’ll venture into the city Pretend our bones are not dust Ignore our fails Hearts soft Love nostalgic Hold hands like lovers Location historic (ours alone) celebrate resilience.
(Today we celebrate our anniversary. Image my own)
A simple shoebox, repurposed with plastered images of dreams – paper affirmations of aspirations – shelved and forgotten, its contents
snapshots, faded and torn, remnants of another time, a different future – captured when potential was prime and possibility untainted by illness
This one was retirement – a supposed celebration – but note how the colour has drained the cracks obliterating pride of accomplishment; and notice
how this one crumbles to the touch – the fragments dissipating even as my life has dissipated, the image lost before memory resurfaces, so
much loss when circumstance dictates direction, overpowers will, and plans like snowflakes, vanish in the heat of reality – pain and insult burning
But wait…this one looks promising – the edges only slightly torn, the image discernible – could it be that there is hope yet – a future author I might be?
That’s the thing about times to come, we fill them with imaginings, and pray, our hope, like balloons set free in a sea of unforeseen challenges, and seldom
does the end result reflect projected plotting, and yet, there is power in the dreaming, and so I’ll replace the old with new photographs to store away.
(This is a rerun of a rerun. Still resonates. Image my own)
Slippers, perched at night stand, twitching impatiently, mark the absence of feet, cannot appreciate the meaning of unruffled bed covers.
Abandoned, a coffee mug bemoans its curdling contents, complains of thick brown lines contaminating its porcelain shine, has not noted absence of hands.
Chair, pushed back from desk, in partial rotation, sits awkwardly, commanding attention, disturbed by its misalignment, has not thought to ponder absence of body.
House, uncomfortable with silence, creaks unnaturally, loudly voicing objections to the absence of footfalls, automated machinery and incessant rings, beeps, and chimes of technology.
I try to reassure them that the absence is only temporary, that the man whose presence so strikingly fills this space will return, hope they cannot read the apprehension in my tremulous heart.
(Absence was written six years ago, while my husband recovered from a triple bypass. Image my own.)
One Woman's Quest 