Winter

The wind was often this cold in the middle of February, but today it was bitter. It was bitter and he was bitter. She had left him “without even giving him a reason.” At least that is what he would tell people for years and years to come. A ring on her finger and the promise of forever fresh on her lips, she had had the nerve to tell him it was over. How would this leave him? Desperate? Alone? Angry? Now that the unthinkable had happened to him, he had the ever present, but much more apparent in this particular situation, decision to make of what his reactive emotion was going to be. What would he carry with him for the foreseeable future?

            March quickly approaching, Adam sat with his head in his hands, still searching for the words to describe how he felt. Maybe, he thought, if he could put it into words, it would hurt less. Maybe, if he could diagnose it, a cure would become apparent and he could pick it up at the local pharmacy. Or maybe it would just go on like this forever. They say that time heals all things, but then why do we hear stories about love that spans across lifetimes even after a lover is lost? Do we ever really heal? Or do we wear a piece of that person we lost on our skin forever, like the scar from a dagger stab: thin, yet deep, always there to remind us of the eyes of our enemy in the moment of their victory?

            As summer reared its sunny face, a mockery to Adam’s mourning, a decision had finally been made. He would keep that February morning with him in his heart forever. It would comfort him—a stony comfort for a broken man. The gods had smiled on him and then laughed in his face.  And time. Time had done nothing for him. He had been patient enough.