In pictures

A yellowing newspaper that smells of apple cinnamon candles lays in her lap.  The paper says his time ended at 5:00pm on March 15, 2005.   The picture staring back at her was taken on her wedding day.  It's one of the few that she has of him.  So few pictures that they wouldn't fill a picture album page.  There is no pictures of her as a child sitting in his lap, them standing together at her graduation, or him hugging her tight as she looks up with undying love.  She didn't grow up in pictures with him.  Eight years later she has her wedding pictures, a few that one of his childhood friends gave her of him living his life as he did and the picture of her as a child she found in his house after he left.


Small tears fall just the same as they do when she watches a movie that portrays a parent and child relationship that just never made it.  The same tears she feels inside when she listens to others relay relationship problems they have with their estranged children.  The little girl is screaming inside "Don't you see.  Don't you see the gift you had in me" but the screams fall silent because there is nobody to scream it at.  That time has come and gone and screaming at a newspaper doesn't change time.  She shakes her head and wipes the tears because she knows that if he stood in front of her today she wouldn't scream.  She would hug him tight and whisper "I love you.  You may not understand but I do.  You may never be able to say it but I know that in the end I was better off for the way the road took us.  I know that you may not have meant it to be a gift but I look at it as that.  You couldn't do full time and I would never have been happy with part time.  I'm not angry.  I cry because I know our relationship was not meant to begin until we both grew up and our time ended shortly after that time started.  I never denied who you were and I know you shook the hand of the man that has been there for me through it all and thanked him.  You can never imagine the respect I gained for you when I heard that."  When the time to say goodbye would come again she would look into his eyes, reach under his chin and say tickle, tickle as she tickled his neck just like she did when she was little.  She would kiss his forehead, hug him one more time and then take a picture of them smiling and hugging with her looking up at him with undying love.