Sunny Sunday

The thing that I miss the most is watching her come through the front door.

The unmistakable cadence of her walk up the pathway to the house

The rattle of the key in the lock

Her presence in the doorway, her movement into the living room

The reassurance of her presence, confirming that I was not alone in the world

That small sequence of events on a daily basis was part of my life

A support system once attained much taken for granted

We would lapse into the common routines of pleasantries, tasks, infighting,

And then make up until our jobs dragged us apart.

Work filled the void through the day

Different types of needs over-rode the contribution she made to my life

Challenges and rewards diffused the need to be with her twenty four hours a day

Sometimes she was forgotten until the pressures demanded that somebody listen

Somebody understand, and then I would patiently wait for her to come home.

One day she didn’t, nor the next day, in fact never again

Now five years later I live without the dread she won’t be coming through the door

I live with feelings carefully guarded against the joy that footsteps bring.

I live alone. It wasn’t meant to be that way. But that’s the way it happened

An omen to the infighters

The children fill part of the void. But, time has taught me that their fragile structure

Can’t provide support for the imbalanced load of an estranged parent

They seek light and life and deftly dodge the shadows cast by solitude

They mean no malice.

They have their own pathway to find and can’t follow missing footsteps.

So Sunny Sunday, you and me and a million memories. Five long years

Thank God they are over.