Coal

It was such a trivial encounter.  It should’ve been meaningless really.  It was meaningless.  And yet she would find herself thinking about him quite a bit, sometimes constantly.  At first she had convinced herself it was some sort of collusion of the stars, fate, that good old meant-to-be feeling.  She’d seen him, been completely struck.  She’d thought about him all day, allowing her poor luck to weigh her down as though she were carrying an anvil in her pocket.  And then it had happened again.  It was as if her mind had manifested him to give her heart one last squeeze before sending it on its miserable way.  Then nothing.  One moment it was a monsoon in the desert, the tiny flower that grows in the city sidewalk, the baby turtle crossing the length of the beach.  And the next it was dry as it had ever been, crushed under a hurried designer wingtip, snapped up by a seagull flying overhead.

In the immediate aftermath he came to her all the time.  In the familiar places.  In the unfamiliar but still possible places.  He was everywhere and nowhere; everything and nothing.  She’d see him in all the faces of the men passing by, at stoplights, checking out at the grocery store, waiting for a table at a restaurant.  Her heart would beat like a caged bird’s and then shrivel upon recognition, or rather the lack thereof.  This went on for an unreasonable amount of time, more than she would ever admit.

Gradually, almost unrecognizably, the giant flame of him began to gently diminish, then became a glowing red ember, and then finally a coal, black on the outside, dead as far as she knew.  Sometimes she’d think that was it.  But that thought would only come in retrospect as he came to her again.  He’d enter her consciousness at the most unsettling and foolish times.  On the day of her wedding, when her children were born, ridiculous moments such as those where he should be the furthest from her mind.

But worse than that, he would show up without warning, completely consuming her in the most mundane of moments.  When she was loading the dishwasher, emptying the always overflowing bathroom trashcan, putting her children’s things in the car before school, while reading an arbitrary passage in her bible before sleep consumed her.  The utter disregard of his abrupt return would take her breath away.

She wondered if God would forgive her.  She wondered if she’d ever forgive herself.  For either outcome; for both.  Most of all she wondered if he’d ever leave her.  Would she be thinking about him fifty or more years from now, wrinkled and hunched with a blanket over her legs, perhaps racked with disease, dying in a small room alone, or surrounded by her family.  Would he still be in her heart if it were failing her?  If such a traitorous organ could not continue to provide blood to her veins would it still beat rapidly at the slightest thought of him?  Would he still be in her mind if she couldn’t even remember where or even who she was?  Would that piece of coal hold a tiny ember still burning until her soul left her body?