What does one do, 6 years after being widowed?
Where do we stand?
What does life mean in the here and now?
Does the future finally carry meaning for us?
Or is life simply one filled with questions?
About ourselves, our lives, the life we lived, the life we have to live in the without…
I always feel a vague sense of unease when I tell someone newly widowed how long it’s been for me, when it’s followed up by the question, sometimes unspoken…
How are you doing now?
Because I hate to tell them that, in spite of all that I’m doing, how colorful it all looks, how much Love there is in the world for me…that the loneliness for Chuck and the life we shared leaves me feeling empty, because it’s further and further away from me.
That it pains me to look at pictures of us together now because there are no new pictures added. It’s the same pictures.
24 years frozen in time.
I still love looking at them, and I’ll admit it’s with hungry eyes, but they’re a reminder that that was it.
I wish I could tell them that I’ve enthusiastically embraced this new life of mine and I see a future shining brightly ahead of me.
But how to explain that yes, I do embrace this life I’ve created for myself while still firmly living in the past, because there is nothing in this life that is as good as the life I had?
I don’t want to scare them. Or intimidate them about their own futures.
We all do this in our own way. We put our fingerprints on what we create.
My fingerprints are all over this pink life I’ve created, living on the road.
I feel it fully. I’m living it fully.
And missing the ever loving fuck out of the life I had with the man I adored~