Absence in Two Takes

One

The dimensions of your absence are infinite. I smile now at my attempts to measure it from within, when the space we filled left no room to stand back and look. Shrieks and screams, laughter and lovemaking, the long years of raising our sons, now men with children of their own.

I have come to love the stillness, and its clarity. In the quiet of my solitude I savor the waves of memories that wash over me. Happy that in the tally of one’s lifetime we shared our souls, wrapped in stardust, with a passion known only to few.

Two

We met as we were recovering from our own separate shipwrecks. We survived acts of pain, of sacrifice, of terror, and we were the beneficiaries of the gifts of our sons, and we lost ourselves in their care and feeding. She was a center of it, though not the only one. There was the work, leading technology for nonprofits that mattered. There was being pops to the boys. There is the path I walk now.

And there is this. The state of being here, now. To be. Each coin has two sides, a head on one and a tail on the other: the state of being here, and the state of being away from. Presence in each instant of its existence, absence, its flavor depending on whether its content is pain or pleasure. Lately I have been tasting the qualities of each. The sweetness of the air I breathe in meditation, never noticed until the acrid air of distant wildfires blew in.

Now that the clouds have pursed their lips and blown the smoke away, I sit in stillness, rest my hands on folded legs, and embrace the sweetness of each sip of fresh air cleansed by living trees. My lips turn up in a smile of gratitude.

Everywhere I turn I am reminded of her absence. And still, the truth of the matter is that I am grateful, and now happy, that I have them. The living ones. The path I am moving along. I lived an amazing, crazy life. I am living one still.