and I. Love you still

  I still miss you my Michael

   I know I have been alone for years now; you living away at a place where you can get good loving 24/7 care…

    But I can’t believe…I can’t assimilate into my very being, that you, my husband of 47 years, you, are gone…now. 

   Gone from the found objects we collected thru the years, that I now look at alone, gone from the rooms I now inhabit without you. Gone from the air we shared and the moonlight we stood under and gazed at. 

   You are gone from the simple lists I made each morning and gone from  dreaming plans we might have talked about and planned for. 

    It’s quiet here now, in the apt. we made our home. The TV isn’t on much nor the radio. I find little meaning to what I read. You are not here to comment in a conversing

Dance we never really were good at because you were too busy with your continual home-work or too tired from giving yourself completely when away at work. So there was little left for me at the end of each day. 

  Yet I miss you. I miss those challenges. I even miss the disappointments which seemed to add up to many as the years sped by, while we lived our daily lives, so full of other people and other agenders which were separate and apart from the us we were in the beginning of us. 

   The questions I used to ask you are not spoken now, just thought. simple ones like dinner plans or weekend diversions from the daily grind of living our life together. 

I like to think you are off somewhere in another space-time, another frequency, into new adventures I will not ever know. 

    I look at the walls and listen to their creaks at night, alone in my solitude of mourning. 

 I do miss you. 47 years is not a blip in time but a whole lifetime of living, each day of each year. 

    Some were wonderful joyous gifts of life I will not forget, in our beginnings, some everyday jobs and duties filled time with the mundane, leaving evenings quiet and empty. I was alone then, but you always came home…to me. 

 There is no key turning late in the night, no acknowledgement of cohabitation, no nearness under covers. 

  As we grew in our marriage instead of pillars standing apart yet together holding up our house, life  intervened in unexpected twists and turns that seemingly came out of nowhere and pulling us further apart the pillars that were us lost their hold on our structure. Yet neither of us was strong enough to walk away, though we tried and I could not  abandon you when your fragility and illnesses showed their appearances and so I stayed and fought for you because in spite of being unhappy in the latter years of our marriage, I loved you still. 

  My job is finished and we are not anymore. I will live on our beginnings and the good living we did have. . .your Marcia