Packing...

When he came home that night, he glanced in quickly to see her sitting on the bed. “You all right?” he asks her as she silently nods her head yes. The boxes where on the floor but it didn’t look like she had accomplished much over the weekend. “How was the funeral?” she says in an oddly numb voice. “It was sad, Grandmamma is taking it pretty hard” was the reply he gave as he went into the living room to sit in his favorite chair. She heard the TV come on as she decided to get up and start the packing she had vowed to herself she would have done before he got back. And as much as she wanted this part to be over, she just couldn’t stay focused long enough to get anything done. All the great plans she had made that Thursday night had died quietly over the long weekend and now her husband was home and she still had no boxes finished. But every time she tried to start, the sadness overwhelmed her and she couldn’t get past the fact that their life together was ending. How could this have happened? Her heart would scream, while her mind told her it happened because she let it. There was no one else to blame but herself. That thought alone caused her very soul to burn, she had let this happen, this was her fault. She had driven him into another woman’s arms just as sure as if she had pick up the keys and put him into the car herself. And oh God, now there was a baby. Not her baby, but his baby. A baby born to another woman, one who had been able to give him the baby that she had hoped for so long ago. A baby she would never know, a part of him that she would never have. The dreams of having a baby with her husband, the part of seeing someone that both of them had created, had died years before for her. Not that she had ever forgotten that she couldn’t, a woman never forgets that, but she thought she had accepted it, made peace with the demons who ever so often raised their head if she looked at baby clothes for to long in stores even now. Then she learned of a daughter, only 5 months old, and her world just stopped.Had it been 11 days now? How many tears had she shed in the past 11 days? So many that she thought another tear would never leave her eyes again, but then her mind would go back to the very second when she ask him if he had a baby and the one word answer he gave “yes” would tear her soul out again and again just like it did the first time she had heard it and the tears would come. She hears him sigh in the living room and she knows that he doesn’t want to hear her pain anymore. It must be as hard on him in ways as it is on her. But her sorrow is like a heavy stone necklace she wears around her neck. It wears her down, minute-by-minute, becoming heavier with every thought and she is powerless to take it off. It never leaves her, never gives her a chance to breath without knowing it’s there, and she knows without a doubt, that she’ll never be without it again. But there are boxes to finish, lives to separate, and a baby somewhere waiting for her father, so she does the only thing she knows to do. She starts packing………..
Cynthia B.
September 22, 2002