by\u00a0Anna Desourdy<\/p>\n
It was such a trivial encounter.\u00a0 It should\u2019ve been meaningless really.\u00a0 It was meaningless.\u00a0 And yet she would find herself thinking about him quite a bit, sometimes constantly.\u00a0 At first she had convinced herself it was some sort of collusion of the stars, fate, that good old meant-to-be feeling. \u00a0She\u2019d seen him, been completely struck.\u00a0 She\u2019d thought about him all day, allowing her poor luck to weigh her down as though she were carrying an anvil in her pocket.\u00a0 And then it had happened again.\u00a0 It was as if her mind had manifested him to give her heart one last squeeze before sending it on its miserable way.\u00a0 Then nothing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And the next it was dry as it had ever been, crushed under a hurried designer wingtip, snapped up by a seagull flying overhead.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the immediate aftermath he came to her all the time.\u00a0 In the familiar places.\u00a0 In the unfamiliar but still possible places.\u00a0 He was everywhere and nowhere; everything and nothing.\u00a0 She\u2019d 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.\u00a0 Her heart would beat like a caged bird\u2019s and then shrivel upon recognition, or rather the lack thereof.\u00a0 This went on for an unreasonable amount of time, more than she would ever admit.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Sometimes she\u2019d think that was it.\u00a0 But that thought would only come in retrospect as he came to her again.\u00a0 He\u2019d enter her consciousness at the most unsettling and foolish times.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But worse than that, he would show up without warning, completely consuming her in the most mundane of moments.\u00a0 When she was loading the dishwasher, emptying the always overflowing bathroom trashcan, putting her children\u2019s things in the car before school, while reading an arbitrary passage in her bible before sleep consumed her.\u00a0 The utter disregard of his abrupt return would take her breath away.<\/p>\n
She wondered if God would forgive her.\u00a0 She wondered if she\u2019d ever forgive herself.\u00a0 For either outcome; for both.\u00a0 Most of all she wondered if he\u2019d ever leave her.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Would he still be in her heart if it were failing her?\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Would he still be in her mind if she couldn\u2019t even remember where or even who she was?\u00a0 Would that piece of coal hold a tiny ember still burning until her soul left her body?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
by\u00a0Anna Desourdy Anna Desourdy is\u00a0a pre-school teacher, wife, and mother to two boys and a miniature dachshund.\u00a0 She and her family live on about ten acres in a small suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina. In addition to writing, Anna enjoys reading any and all genres, perusing Instagram and Litsy, contributing to the Wattpad community, cooking, … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sa867U-coal","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions\/152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}