This story was chosen from our reader submissions as part of our initiative to collect Love Stories from our readers for Issue No. 9: Love. To submit a story email info@redflagmag.org.
My love, my sweet husband, although I know there is no use, sometimes my mind will wander to what it would have been like if life were reversed…
If I had been the one that died that day.
If I was the one that lie on the side of the river without a breath in my chest and you were the one who received the call in the hallway of our home.
I think about what it would have been like for you, my love, how you would have reacted upon hearing those words. Hearing that I had taken my last breath and closed my eyes leaving you to keep going without the comfort of my presence in a world that is spinning out of control.
As I think of this my body physically aches to the thought of your pain.
I think of your reaction. I wonder if you would have made the same visceral sounds that came out of my throat in the moments after I heard the gut wrenching words.
Would you have cried and cried until your eyes glossed over and you stared at the space ahead wondering if perhaps it is possible to die of a broken heart?
I am so thankful that you didn’t have to feel this, my love, and that you were beautifully ignorant to the kind of pain that I now feel is etched into my heart creating magnetic, raw scars.
These scars that are still tender but comprise evidence of their healing.
I wonder how you would have moved through the grief. Through the hours of silence and the years of tears. Where your eyes would have turned during the darkest hours and longest nights.
I am growing and changing and moving forward, whatever that means. I am more vibrant; I can sing and dance, laugh and smile.
But through all of this, my love, in the moments that I least expect it, I once again get the wind knocked out of me by the overwhelming feeling that you are not right next to me.
The scars being stretched with each of these reflections.
I look at pictures and physically ache with a longing to hold your face in my hands and hold my lips to your mouth only to feel your breath in the air.
So, as the scars leave their mark while my heart heals, I reach deeply for the answers to my powerful imagination of what it would have been like for you, my love, and as I do, my mind goes back to this time…
After you died I was blessed with the opportunity to hold your hand and to kiss your lips.
You looked so beautiful; so perfect.
I walked up to you as if I was walking on air, tiptoeing to the last moments I would have with you on this earth.
I grasped your hands so tightly that I couldn’t quite tell if it was actually your hands that were cold to the touch or if perhaps they were mine, our lives being confused for one last time on this earth.
It is in these singular memories that I now understand what it would have been like for you during this entire process of grief; don’t I my love.
For our love has always been intertwined so ornately that I know the answer lies in my own journey.
When we married we did so with the idea that we would became one. Our love and our light interlacing together. So, my love, I am thankful that life was not reversed.
That your heart was spared the shattering of it’s lining.
For I know your journey would have mirrored mine, our hearts equal in their measure, just as our hands were that day long ago.
Our joys and our anguish will continue to cry out together, yours on the other side and mine on this journey of life.
Your heart is so much a part of mine that I will walk forward not knowing where yours ends and mine begins.
Until we meet again, my love, I will use our love to shift the universe. You can change the world with a powerful love story.
As we always said..
I love you equal, I love you to the moon and I will love you for eternity.
Melissa
Melissa Wilder Joyce‘s love for words, love for traveling and love for meeting unique and diverse people have helped shape her into a woman with less fear and more commitment to the inquisitiveness of what else is out there. As she travels the world and continues to grow in her understanding of what is real, her hope is to continue to help inspire others to take a different path every time they leave their front door. Follow her to find out her latest thoughts on love and life. Connect with her by Face Book @ Melissa Wilder Joyce
Photo credit : Julia Kinnunen @ juliakinnunenphotography.com