Without him

20 February 2020

It was a bitter night. The wind was howling outside and she recalled how it had tugged at her hair and the umbrella almost yanking it out of her gloved hands. She had been glad to have gloves on as it was biting cold outside. Her cheeks seared with the acid bite of the cold. The elements raging outside were no match, however, for the cold that was biting into her heart as the days went by without him. She wondered if he was now gone forever or if he would come back like he had done after a period of absence around a year ago.

She stretched on the sofa where she had been lying down watching the screen without actually taking in what was going on in the Television set just across the room. She looked at the reed in the canal outside her room and could see it bend wildly this way and that as the wind tore away at its roots attempting to uproot the reed. The wind was, however, no match to the resilient reed which withstood the tear of the wind and just bent gracefully one way or the other depending on the twists and turns of the wind.

She felt she should be more like the reed and adapt to the situations as they arose. She should get used to the times when he disappeared however much they hurt. He was anyway like a ghost in her life so she should not expect him to have a normal pattern of behavior. He was gone for longer than the other time but it did not mean that he would not be back again. She felt ice fill her heart as the veracity of his absence sunk into her mind. There was no sunshine when he was not around. Indeed she thought, there was no sunshine without him….

Ain’t no sunshine – Eva Cassidy