for my ex, on her birthday*
I have rarely written of it;
I barely think of it.
Now, ten years separate us.
But your heart can not skip
lightly away from thirty years.
When I do remember it punches
me hard in the solar plexus,
like the scenes from that
long ago and far away war.
It took the wind out of my sails;
a chunk out of my life;
more than a little piece of my heart...
so many cliches and all so true.
We have moved on,
as another cliche goes.
It is not the wife I miss,
but the very human person
and the life we made together.
Thirty years does not make
a life sentence, but a long one.
What you think will be
and what becomes,
conjoin and diverge.
Love is like the daily weather;
it arrives and then it departs.
Some storms cannot be survived,
but nothing is really ever lost.
~mce