A Sad Story...

She sat in the familiar front row of church... and she heard not a word from the pulpit. The minister droned on and on... it might as well have been Greek.

The Bible lay open in her lap. She gripped it tightly. Her knuckles were white and the cover pressed imprints into her fingertips. She desperately wanted to cry, dear God, she wanted to cry! But there was nothing but the feeling of a hard lump of gravel in her throat and a heart as heavy as lead. 

Suddenly feeling ridiculously daring, she hazarded a glance behind her. He was sitting three rows back, hunched forward, staring steadily forward.

Their eyes met. Time stood still. She stopped breathing and her heart stopped beating.

His eyes were gray and rimmed with red. He looked angry... she had never seen him look like that before. He glared at her and it struck uncomprehending terror into her being.

It's not my fault! her heart silently cried. Believe me, please... it isn't my fault... I don't want to go! 

Her silent plea died away unheard and she whirled to face the minister again, feeling her face flaming. She was too afraid to look at him again. Half an hour later, the service was over and they were filing out of the sanctuary. She kept her eyes glued firmly to the doorway ahead of her, resisting the magnetic urge that tried to pull her to him. She was leaving church, and him along with it... shouldn't she start getting used to it now? 

oOo

The time was ticking away. Soon the second service would be over and she would have to say her goodbyes. Would he speak...? Or must her farewell to him be silent? As silent as her love for him? 

The minister still spoke and she stood in the hallway alone. A wild urge seized her... she turned and fled.

In the coat room, she paused. There, hanging side by side with her own coat, was his. She staggered forward... gathered it in her arms... buried her face in the fabric... and let herself weep. Great, shaking sobs. And she let her tears fall on his coat. 

She could hear the minister announcing the final hymn... and she detangled herself from the coat... brazenly not even ashamed of her wild emotion... boldly planting a kiss on the sleeve... and she retreated back to the hall.

His Oma found her there and came to hold her hand. The final hymn was being sung now... a song of parting and of pain. She could see him through the open doors... sitting hunched over as he had been that morning... his head down, his glasses in his hand,

Oma clutched her hand tighter and they both wept. The song ended. She could no longer contain her emotion. Tears fell like rain and her body shook with sobs. She didn't even care that everyone could see. She glanced up as they filed into the hall, and through the dim haze of tears, her eyes met his again.

And again... time stood still. She held his gaze and let herself cry and realized numbly that... he was crying too.

She didn't know how long it lasted... while she looked into his eyes, it seemed forever... and when she tore herself away it didn't seem like anything at all. She never could be sure of it afterwards... whether it had been real or imagined... that for a few moments everything and everyone else had vanished and they had simply stood there and cried together.

Cry... him?! Men didn't cry... not in public... she must have been mistaken. Doesn't the imagination play odd tricks? When, only half an hour later, she watched him nonchalantly joking and telling stories, she was certain it had only been imagined. He  certainly couldn't... wouldn't... cry for her.

oOo

She had a rampant imagination and it was swiftly becoming a curse. Now, in the single most important thing of her life to date, the one thing she couldn't bear to mistake, her imagination was most assuredly torturing her yet again.

Memories... cherished ones... imagined, twisted to her liking, blown out of proportion, skewed to fit what she wanted them to, surely! All he had ever done was exchange a few polite words... hold the door as anyone would have done... shake her hand just because everyone shook hands... because it was polite.

That one Sunday... when she came back from being gone three weeks... he had stood by the door, the first person she had seen when she got there... coincidence, of course! He couldn't have been waiting for her. And when he opened the door... nothing but common decency. He had offered his hand, said good morning... and that was when it happened... or she thought it did. She turned to step away, felt his hand still gently closed around hers... and her heart stopped beating. Another step and her hand slowly slid from his grasp... and she felt the wind knocked out of her. She staggered a step or two as the world spun round and found herself unable to speak. She pressed her hand against her heart... the hand he had held onto... and chided herself for being a ninny.

Imagination, that's all it was. No lingering, sentimental touch. Or perhaps he was simply in the habit of slow handshakes. She was foolish... why on earth would he, of all people, be reluctant to let go of her hand... she, of all people! An imagined, story-type situation.

Nothing more.

And for the thousandth time she told herself this, laughed a moment at her continued persistence in the third person as if that made debunking her imagination any easier, and blinked back a few tears. 

Maybe she had imagined it all. Not maybe, but very probably. But one thing was certain and this she could never doubt... that she loved him. Maybe it was a foolish, uninformed, hopeless, pathetic sort of one-sided love... but love it still was and very much not imagined. And just to be sure of it, she counted the ways.

She loved his eyes... those fascinating, ever-changing blue eyes... sometimes a stormy gray, sometimes a laughing sea green, sometimes a deep navy, sometimes a brilliant turquoise... and always going back to that quiet, thoughtful gray blue... eyes so deep she could drown in them.

She loved his smiles... all three of them. That quiet, musing, thoughtful smile, that crooked, amused sort of grin... and the rarest of all... the sudden flash of the most beautiful smile she had ever seen... the one that seemed to reveal his inner soul somehow... and it only ever lasted a moment and was gone again. 

She loved his hands. And she laughed at herself rather awkwardly in writing it, for it sounded funny. But she couldn't help it... she loved his hands. Big, strong hands and long fingers, roughened by work. Some said he gave bone-crushing handshakes. If so, she had never felt one. When he took her hand in his, he seemed to cradle it gently, a warm, firm clasp, and her small hand seemed to fit so perfectly inside his big one... it seemed almost caressing, the way he held her hand... and she never wanted him to let go. And yet it never lasted longer than a moment. But she felt that gentle touch of his long, long after he let go.

She loved his voice... deep, but not too deep... and with a soft, lazy sort of drawl that she never really could identify. It wasn't really southern, wasn't really western... maybe it was a bit of both, with something unique and all his own thrown into it. It was distinct, too. She could pick it out of a hundred voices, all speaking at once, and hang onto it, until it was all that she heard... even if he was too far away for her to understand his words.

She loved how tall he was, the way he towered over her, the way he bent his head over hers when he spoke to her, the way he stood out in a crowd... and yet never seemed conscious of it. Just an easy comfortableness to the way he stood there, not aware that he stood out... one in a million to her.

She had memorized every line of his face, somehow... and she loved every detail. Loved the way his hair hung over his forehead, thick and wavy... loved the determined tilt of his chin. Loved the way he took off his glasses, frowning at them while he wiped them on his shirt, and pushed them back on again. Loved how he stood alone, not caring that he wasn't a part of what was going on, loved that he was a loner... just like her. And somehow, he could still be the life of the party... when he wanted to be.

She had often stood near him... just the two of them... standing side by side in silence. She loved that more than anything. She felt an invisible bond between them in those moments... a kindred spirit sort of camaraderie. They understood each other... sympathized with each other... were perfectly comfortable standing side by side together and not speaking.

Imagination again. Those times she had felt that something had passed between them... nothing but wistful imaginings. All one sided.

And yet... it was lovely while it lasted. It felt like a warm and safe hug from the one person you loved and trusted above all others in all the world... just to stand at his side.

She loved him even when he laughed at her... from anyone else it would have hurt her feelings and yet... from him... it didn't hurt at all. She actually loved the way he laughed at her somehow... when she said or did something that couldn't be anything but stupid... just a quirk of his crooked grin and a twinkle in his blue eyes... and a low, quiet laugh... and she was mortified, but at the same time filled nearly to bursting with that reckless, foolish love... spreading through her like a warm glow.

It was while he was laughing (but not at her) that she first realized she loved him. The realization came like a sharp, stabbing pain. A wistful loneliness like never before. A feeling of dreadful emptiness. She saw him laugh and felt that she was missing out on the most wonderful and beautiful thing on earth. She knew then and there that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him and no other... in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, richer or poorer... she wanted nothing more than to be with him forever, come what may. Just the two of them against the world...

And the realization came with the worst pain she had ever known. Until the pain of leaving him behind came to rival that and left her nothing but a crushed, broken, bleeding shell of what she used to be.

The days dragged on by now... each one feeling emptier than the one before it. The lonely ache grew until it was unbearable, and yet, it must be borne.

And side by side with the loneliness and pain grew a fear like nothing she had ever known before... the fear that she was wrong about all this, the fear that she must give him up forever and learn to love another.

She grew cynical, angry, defiant, spiteful, depressed. And she hid it inside of herself to keep others from seeing her pain. Trust was impossible, no one could be trusted. And bitter hatred of those who pushed her to a new life and to forget him threatened to choke her.

In all this, she knew. She knew she was being unreasonable, detestable, an annoyance, a stubborn pain. And yet in her own pain, she simply did not care. She lashed out, let herself hurt others, and did not care.

"Thy will be done, and help me to be content," she prayed over and over, but they were only words. She was afraid of God's will.

She shut people out, let friendships die, built walls around her heart. And he was the only one she let in... and yet shut out at the same time, she was angry at him... and still she clung to him. She felt herself loving him more than ever in her misery and fear and loneliness, felt her heart growing closer to him... and hated herself for it. Wanted to move on, to forget him, to shut him out forever and yet hold on to him as tight as she could, silently promising him to never let go,

And all the time, he knew nothing of this. And the knowledge of that drove her mad, made her feel more foolish than ever.

I'd like to say she learned a lesson here, that she changed... but no. No such luck. 

Here I am, as foolish as ever... broken, crushed, and bleeding, loving him more than I ever thought it possible to love another human being and sorting through the pieces that are left of my shattered, miserable, stubborn heart.

Some of those pieces are gone forever.