There is a story here. —I can barely tell it. And I only have a few
words to express it in.
The story is almost forgotten but some
of it I remember.
The story concerns a woman in an
apartment on a street. If I could write
a poem on this I would. But let me whisper it into your ears, of this woman, of
mothers. We’ve all seen it over and over.
My tongue would be torn loose, it would rattle against my teeth, should
I deny it wasn’t taking place, someplace, everyplace, everywhere.
There is a young woman in an apartment,
she is lovely and overdressed, meeting her boyfriend, she’s sixteen, he’s
eighteen, and she’s pregnant. He is
consumed with doubt the father will agree for him to marry her, they are both
so young, but he does. And thus he no longer moves nervously in her father’s
apartment.
Now the woman and the man, husband and
wife, with their two-year old baby boy, are waiting—waiting, in the hospital
for another baby boy to be born, so soon they’ll have a family of four. The
daughter’s father is there also.
That is the foundation of my story,
family, and everything I will ever know is distilled in it. Without family,
what is there?
As the years pass, 22-years in total,
silent and good and bad years (although the bad
would include for both husband and wife ten-trying years of alcoholism), they have a third baby, a boy again, he’ll only live
fifteen months and die, and in-between the husband will die. And the two other boys are all grown up now,
leading their own lives.
How silent the apartment is for her, how
loudly it used to be. Her sons are mostly gone, she works now for a fast-food
chain, making burgers. She finds herself waiting, but for what? Her mother helps her out some but she’s alone
in her apartment too; thus, she’s mostly alone. She hungers for love with her
whole being, everyone is leading their own lives.
She had created love, but they are all
gone.
She calls her father, she can’t make the
apartment payment, the refrigerator is empty, and the electric bill is unpaid,
she per near begs, she’s hiding in the restroom of the restaurant writing her
father with a friend’s cellphone, luckily he’s on his Facebook page. The father
helps, as often he has in the past—and tells her she’ll have money by noon
tomorrow, she’s relieved; because family is family, but he’s in another
country, 6000-miles away, and everyone else is as broke as she is, and he knows
that, and so if he doesn’t help, who will? But with the money her father will
send, and with her part time job, she’s make ends meet.
I have no words to tell what took place,
I don’t know what took place in the
interim of this story, therefore I can’t tell the whole story as I’d like to,
thus leaving out details, and descriptions. But we have death, and sickness,
and children growing up, and folks in the background. And she is waiting
eagerly, and for what? She tells her father, I have no intentions of getting
married again. But then she writes him saying 18-months after her husband’s
death: “I found someone, I’m going to marry
him in eight months, I’m fearful of telling mom, and one of my sons.” But she does.
Most of the time I do not think of them
at all those in the background, I do think of the woman, she’s the main part
throughout this whole story. I could if
I wished to, tell you a wonderful story, make you laugh, but how would I tell
it. During all this time, she became a Christian, and two days before her
husband died, he became a Christian, that’s something special. So among the creeping crawling vine-like
things in life, do not weary, God provides each step of the way, this story
proves it. Life needs moments of silence along the way. Life is a riddle
sometimes, with winds and limitless waters, and as might have been expected,
things have all worked out for her, for now! And somehow, she did what nature
intended her to do, to be a cheerful, kindly woman through it all.
#1192/10-23-2016
