A Feeling

There’s this feeling. One you get right before something terrible happens. You have this quiet moment where everything is numb and you’re not exactly sure what the terrible thing is, but you know it’s coming. This really devastating, life altering, terrible thing and there’s nothing you can do but wait for it to happen. You wait for it in stillness. Thinking that maybe if you don’t move, maybe don’t breathe it won’t hear you and it’ll leave you alone. Go on its way and be terrible for somebody else, but this kind of terrible doesn’t disappear no matter how frozen you remain. It calls you up in the voice of your husband and tells you that your single most favorite human will no longer be a part of your life, because she was sick and decided not to burden anybody with the details. She decided that she would leave without warning and to top it off, she called my husband just before. I know he was her son, but I was her best friend. Or, at least she was mine. I never had a mother growing up and that was fine with me because I didn’t know what I was missing, but she changed everything.

Now I’m standing outside staring at her house and all I can think about is that moment right before the call. Wishing that I hadn’t answered. Wishing that I could’ve lived in a world where she was alive for just a couple more minutes. Hoping that she told my husband she wanted me to go to her house the next day because she left something that would let me know she loved me as much as I did her. Walking through her house is confusing. I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing. Looking for something? Cleaning? Packing? All she said was to go to her house. Well, I’m here and I don’t have a clue what to do. Moving from room to room disoriented, until I look down the hallway and know exactly what I’m doing here.

You see, there’s this feeling. One you get right before something incredible happens. The kind of incredible that strengthens you more than you knew possible. Makes you feel like a billion bucks. Sixty two billion to be exact, but I’ll explain that in a second. The door at the end of the hallway led to an almost empty room. The only things inside were a video tape and a little black book lying on the floor. I had never seen the book before, but I knew what the tape was. I had seen it about eight years ago. The writing on the front reads “The Twins’ Dance Recital”. Only issue, is that the twins in this tape aren’t my children and the only dancing they were doing was on my husband’s face. Inside the book was a letter telling me everything she said would’ve been too difficult to say in person. She’d known about the infidelity for years. She knew that I’d known, but stayed with him all this time because I couldn’t lose her. Now she was gone and even from the grave was making sure that I would be okay. Making sure that I knew I could never lose her, but that I could leave him. At the back of the book was a check for sixty two billion dollars. I knew she was wealthy, but I didn’t know she was sixty two billion wealthy. Turns out she was and now, apparently so am I.