Anniversary
We spent our honeymoon in the dense, untrodden wet of the Pacific Northwest. You in your rain poncho among the evergreens, for all the world as Eve in her garden, grace and beauty defined and tethered into corporal loveliness. The smell of earth and winter wash, of driftwood cast from the fickle ocean, lifted us like ambrosia, and we walked together down beaten paths worn by time and adventure, the stillness and our love all the proof we needed to know that we were the last humans on earth. I think about those days, the happiest of my life, when I knew so assuredly what it meant to be your husband, and I note the moments slipping away one by one, like grains of sand on our hidden beach, swallowed and forgotten. I find myself neither here nor there, drifting aimlessly, lost and without purpose, as my purpose had been you for so long. Now I rise clumsily from the ashes of my broken world, and I can’t help but reason that when you died, I too ceased to be.
