Repentance

Framed by the doorway, her silhouette stands quietly.

A frail statue bathed in the glow of a distant TV. News

from afar, painful, and surreal. The stain

of a tear on her cheek as she waits for acknowledgement.

The kind her husband ceased to provide long ago.

My refusal, a slap to the cheek, another

bitter reminder of her fraying life.  

Her sigh drifts through the dim, lingering, like steam

from a kettle.

I feign sleep and wait for her to leave, then listen to her

weep into her pillow.

I hold onto this moment, refusing to let it drift into the past

like so many others. I clutch it tightly, the first of my growing collection.

A shoebox of newspaper cuttings, yellowed with time and

the absence of fondness.

Memories I don’t want to remember but cannot forget.

I was young, I tell myself. I was stupid.

I still am.

We all have them. Captured moments we hoard like magpies.

Lithographs of time, forever on display, grey ghosts of life’s

mistakes.

Our mistakes.

My mistakes.

I rub my temples, beckoning for a genie to spring forth and

grant me one wish. To rewind and choose a different path.

To empty that shoebox of its contents.

But that’s not how it works is it? Life is a series of reruns and all

you can do is watch.

People used to ask about her, wondered what she was like.

Wanted to hear my stories, so they could feel like they knew her.

I knew her. Once.

But after so many years, she is like a ship lost in fog. A fox darting

between trees. Always just out of sight.

Always just out of reach.

Some days I sit quietly, and watch the candleflame tumble skyward,

its dance another reminder of the years without her.  

I light it out of tradition. Out of obligation. Out of a need to remember.

Not that I can ever forget. Not completely.

And I wait now, like she did. Watching, hoping for her shadow to appear

but knowing that it never will.

Then I weep into my pillow.