Forever Love

Forever Love

‘Where is he?’ Feels like I’ve been waiting for an eternity.
Then he arrived. At first, he looked a little hazy, but it was Rob.
‘I can’t believe this is what you built for us. It looks as if the new people have left the exterior just how you built it. And look, this tree is still standing’.
I went to look inside the house. ‘You can’t do that’ Rob almost whispered.
‘I…just want to see’ but as I approached the house, a young blonde-haired woman opened the door and stepped outside, sniffing the eucalypts. It had just rained, so I know that fresh smell of the forest which greets your senses. I retreated behind a tree, not wanting to be seen. Rob laughed at me.

Love. How long does true love last? A lifetime, short time or eternal?
Sure; I’d married before, ‘It takes work and dedication’, someone once said.
Subsequently, twenty-two years of that marriage ended. I thought ‘If you have to work this bloody hard it can’t be right’.
Then I met Rob. ‘Funny,’ I said to him one night, ‘You have all the qualities I imagined I would have in a man’.
We build a mudbrick cottage in the magical Australian forest.
I couldn’t be happier.
Then suddenly, Rob left. My world crashed down around me.
He did visit me a couple of times. I never wanted him to leave, but he did.
Then it was my turn to leave. Life changes the older we get, I understood that.
I always said, if we got lost in this vast universe, we would rendezvous under our favourite big tree, at the back of the cottage.
We did meet there at long last, as ghosts from the past.
I took his hand in mine.
It was time for us to go now.
Sandra Jones