Moving On

Have you ever had one of those surreal times when life feels like it is moving slower than usual and it's not till' later that you wonder if it felt that way because it was the moment before?

It was springtime. I was cleaning. I had thrown the front and back doors wide open and the house smelled like cut grass. The baby was in her playpen, throwing her toys out over the edge. They crashed onto the wood floor and the empty living room echoed with her smashes and giggles.

A wicked little breeze whipped through the house. I felt a shiver, and then I felt really, really calm. The baby in her playpen was quiet. Quiet in that worrisome way when you can't remember when they stopped being loud, that way that makes you worry that maybe they have stopped breathing. When I looked in on her, she was standing at the edge looking out toward the living room with this quiet little look on her face. I went back to cleaning, but I shut the doors first.

In my dreams, I see him. He is looking up through the green-cold water and he can see the sun, just a little bit. Then he is there, in my empty new house, seeing what he left me to do when he left me. Seeing the little girl in the playpen, that is his, for the first time. Seeing into my heart, because I've never stopped pining. No one knows yet that he is missing. When his jet-ski washes to public beach, which is not yet raked and clean for the beginning of the season, a Sheriff will remember an odd call from his daughter, who was having lunch on the pier and saw some guy without a wet suit out on the lake on a jet ski. They will look for him for three days.

When the call came, I knew. I just knew and knew and knew. I felt a sad peace. Because I didn't have to be worried he would come back anymore. Because I knew he wouldn't be there to go back to. Because he could finally see the family he left behind for what we were. I thought of my new love, who had proposed to me, who wanted a little girl who liked to throw toys and didn't mind sitting up with her when she had a fever, who liked to talk about whether she would someday play lacrosse or be a ballerina, and even though I had already said yes, and even though my boxes and his boxes sat in an empty living room together, I finally knew I would do it. I could do it. I was half again. Free to be part of a whole.

She has his eyes. The young lady that was-is my baby. Sometimes when she looks at me it takes my breath away. I was never the kind of girl who gave her heart away lightly. I gave it to him first. When it is my turn to go, he will be there to meet me and I will finally heal from years, and from a moment in an empty house in Pennsylvania, just before the call came.