Her Widow Road

It didn’t just here—it was as if Hell had frozen over with her heart. She walks to God’s river to pray and back home alone—cloaked in dark. There were whispers in the trees, in the shrill of the osprey as the icy wind whipped around her knees.

She pulled her strawberry cloak tighter, ever closer—it hugged her and warmed her, reminded her of her lover. Perhaps that was him creating the chill, so she hugged herself to feel him there still. She had such thoughts for she had great desires for a life of peace and art among ancient spires and overlooking a foreign sea blue and green, an endless expance of serene. She’d bathe in the salt of the sea in the moonlight and sunbathe with a paintbrush and easel when the sun rose bright. She’d ride cobbled streets on her little pink lady bike and gather fresh produce, cheese, and wine from the people who create, though growing and making are their arts, and she is grateful to them from the bottom of her heart for helping her love her body with delicious freshness—she’d walked through hell to arrive at this heaven.

Her days come and go like this in this world the making—she wakes to the sun streaming through billowing clouds of curtain, salty sea air licking her lips as she stretches her body and turns her hips, her chest, her face to greet sol’s warm embrace. It caresses her like a lover, with Solomon’s songs, and as she warms to the morn, she says, “Mmm, thank you,” a new day has dawned.

There’s no agenda, just being, living her life, seeing, believing, and just being. Maybe she will take her camera to the Verrazzano vineyard where across the rolling Tuscan hills she is told, see that house? That’s where Mona Lisa sat still for DaVinci to capture her grace and her likeness, and she wonders—can my life really be like this?

On another day she will walk out of her ancient abode onto a perfectly imprefect paverered road and say, “Ciao bella,” to neighbors, blush at an appreciative look from an Italian fella. Though she desires love, here’s one thing she can’t see—why there’s never a man in her fantasy. She believes she knows him, believes he’s placed his hands on her waist, that he’s kissed her lips, her neck, her shoulders, her forehead, and then with his hand laced their fates together, forever intertwined as she arched into him, overwhelmed with desire, this man is divine.

If these two rivers indeed flowed harmoniously into their sea of fusion, then yes, he and she could linger in a sensual effusion of their sacred blends where each day they wake to love and create and being again.

For is this not, she thinks now as the snow falls down and the icy wind whips her hair around, is this not the meaning of life—to live, to love, to cherish—I still wish to be the right person’s wife. For in witnessing the death of a damn good man, she knew she wanted to do it again.

I’m mad she thinks, smiling to her self, this can’t be good for my health. For losing her the one she married unanchored her, unmoored her and into a tumultuous shipwrecking storm she was carried.

Could I? Could I really do it again, could I really intertwine with someone only to one day say goodbye to my most sacred and beloved friend? To the one who made me feel bigger than myself, the one who could look at me naked inside and out and help me understand and more deeply love myself? The one who I will pour everything I have into, just to show him he’s enough, and though we start as two we are one of the same blazing light, which is why there’s so much passion when we make love and kinda fight. But there’s always love and desire and choice. He is the rhythm to my battlecry and the power in my voice.

She’s one of the few, she knows, who’d dive off that cliff a time or two because when it’s real it’s wild, like tandem parachuting or riding bareback or running through the woods like a child. It’s primal and feral and real, and it’s the thing that makes her feel the most, that makes the Phoenix rise and blaze heated passion across the skies.

Yes—she thinks cloaked in a snowy disguise—it’s worth it, it’s worth it to love him even if in my arms he one day dies.