Six Months --Challenge #107 (PG-13)
Posted: Wed Jul 15, 2009 5:34 pm
Usual disclaimers apply
This is a short piece written for the six month anniversary challenge.
Six Months
Six months today. Six months since she slipped away, without warning, stealing off forever into the night where she’d lived for so long. She always had a quiet way about her, but I never thought she’d go without somehow telling me goodbye. I always thought she stayed partly because she couldn’t bear to leave me. And in a way, I was okay with that. Better to have what I had of her, than lose her completely, you know?
And yet, standing here over her grave, I feel like in some odd sense, her death has set me free. It’s not that I don’t still love her, not that I ever—ever—resented caring for her all these years. But it’s as though her leaving gives me permission at last to move on. To maybe look at all the life around me, and take part. I mourn her death, now and always, but somehow she’s given me back the right to love again.
I think she’d like this place. She loved gardens, did I ever tell you that? Her touch could make anything grow, even an old, tired, vampire heart. And after my failure had limited her surroundings to cut flowers and potted plants, I think it’s good for her to be here, with grass and trees, and all the growing things she had to have been missing all this time. I even think that I might like to lie here beside her myself, if it ever becomes necessary.
What she was, where she was, these sixty years, was a lie against her nature. I should have been content to take the decades I could have had at her side. But we never know, do we? So now, she’s laid to rest, perhaps at the end of what her span was meant to be.
And I’ve told a lie on her tombstone, a lie because I wanted it to be true. And I wanted to see it the first time with the sod green over the grave, not raw the way I felt these past few months, knowing she was gone from the world.
So, my love, you rest beneath a stone that bears the name I wanted you to bear. Sarah Whitley Fitzgerald.
This is a short piece written for the six month anniversary challenge.
Six Months
Six months today. Six months since she slipped away, without warning, stealing off forever into the night where she’d lived for so long. She always had a quiet way about her, but I never thought she’d go without somehow telling me goodbye. I always thought she stayed partly because she couldn’t bear to leave me. And in a way, I was okay with that. Better to have what I had of her, than lose her completely, you know?
And yet, standing here over her grave, I feel like in some odd sense, her death has set me free. It’s not that I don’t still love her, not that I ever—ever—resented caring for her all these years. But it’s as though her leaving gives me permission at last to move on. To maybe look at all the life around me, and take part. I mourn her death, now and always, but somehow she’s given me back the right to love again.
I think she’d like this place. She loved gardens, did I ever tell you that? Her touch could make anything grow, even an old, tired, vampire heart. And after my failure had limited her surroundings to cut flowers and potted plants, I think it’s good for her to be here, with grass and trees, and all the growing things she had to have been missing all this time. I even think that I might like to lie here beside her myself, if it ever becomes necessary.
What she was, where she was, these sixty years, was a lie against her nature. I should have been content to take the decades I could have had at her side. But we never know, do we? So now, she’s laid to rest, perhaps at the end of what her span was meant to be.
And I’ve told a lie on her tombstone, a lie because I wanted it to be true. And I wanted to see it the first time with the sod green over the grave, not raw the way I felt these past few months, knowing she was gone from the world.
So, my love, you rest beneath a stone that bears the name I wanted you to bear. Sarah Whitley Fitzgerald.
That was so sad! But beautiful writing! Thank you Lucky!
