Not an easy task living with an unrecognizable individual who shares my life. Vowing to live all the livelong days with a partner in all things marriage, the routes, railways, and stations, most unforeseen. I hear my sister’s advice long ago, “It’s a crapshoot. You really don’t know who you chose until years pass, tragedy strikes, and the dramas of life unfold.” Such wisdom now speaks its truth in the present moment.

Yet I know this man.
I feel his heart.
I know this man.
I feel his love.
I know this man.
I feel his kindness.
I know this man.
I feel his touch.
I know this man.
I feel his respect.
I know this man.
I feel his pain.
I know this man.
He is the stranger in my bed.

When the years assemble and bunch together, the challenge to recollect happier times breathes difficulty. You cannot remember how the passion waned, the loving eyes lost interest, and the reaching for one’s hand vanished. Over time, the kisses diminished, the check-ins descended to ‘Hey’, the phone calls became a monotonous rhythm of “gotta go’s” and the band played on without you. Relentlessly you attempt to recapture what once was, only to find yourselves trapped in same-old, same-old again and again. You wonder what you did, did not do, what you could have, should have, would have done if given a do-over, until there lay the ruins of a marriage upon a desert, dry and dusty. No one’s fault but the winds of change that swept each of you to opposite avenues. You exchange words to organize schedules, orient the children towards promising futures, while the bond between you loosens gradually until the glue unsticks, and parted you become, rather than death disconnecting you.