If only she had known.

Perhaps she would never have gone home after all.

The summer heat draws out the heavy silence in the house, the drone of insects in the garden. His absence growing to enfold her days like a smothering presence. 

Where could he have gone?

In the weeks that followed

her certainty grows.

His memory no longer a faint ghost

but a living part of her, roused from slumber.

It was time to go back

It seemed there was always a third person with them.

His presence like a specter just over her shoulder,

in the corner of her eye.

She could ignore it no longer.

She knew she had to see him.

Why had he come?

It would never be the same without her.

Her ghost shadows him at every turn.

His mind never resting,

grasping,

wondering,

where is she now?

It doesn't matter, after all, does it?

She is with him.

The bleakness of the empty, silent mornings.

He was always there these days,

in her dreams,

hidden behind her eyes. 

Waiting quietly for the still moments,

the unsuspecting moments when suddenly 

he was all she could see or smell or hear.

The memory of him was slowly consuming her.

She had left him.

But he had not left her.

The slow drip of the tap, 

the quiet tick of the clock,

each little sound reminding her 

of her aloneness.

Of what she has lost.

What she gave up.

On his wanderings he could not help his mind dissecting everything they had been.

He should have known.

There were times he wondered who she dressed for?

She would take such care to make herself beautiful, 

yet she never cared what he thought.

After everything, 

to come home and find his trusty, cheerful little friend

frozen on the windowsill,

it seemed a blow too cruel.

And a grief clutches him as he takes it tenderly in his hand,

and knowing it is too late, 

he brings into the warmth of his house,

his anguished heart burning in his chest.

On the heels of the bitter winter that came and settled itself,

burrowing deep into the surrounding forest,

came a certainty, 

like a creeping ice that slowly spread through his chest,

that held him in a tightening vice, 

and that he longed so badly to ignore.

She would not be coming home.

He could hear seagulls in the distance.

"Where are you? Are you with him?"

The silence said it all. 

Like a stone in his gullet.

And he hated himself for asking.

She cannot think about it,

his face when he came upon them together.

The brutal anguish like a keen blade under her skin.

He took what solace he could find,

spending long desolate hours walking the fields,

sitting in the church,

letting the music there transport his very soul 

to such magnificent heights, where all sorrow fled 

his heart and mind.

But each time, upon opening his eyes

his ruined heart was cleaved in two again at his remembering.

Increasingly he felt adrift.

In fact, at times positively lost.

Even work no longer held his fascination,

consumed as he was by dark thoughts of where she may have gone.

Some days, if she thought about his beloved face

 she almost could not remember

why she had even left,

and regret clutched at her heart

until she could no longer breathe.

That day that he had come home early,

Oh! He could not stand to think of it!

His eyes grew hot at the memory.

In the morning the thunder is still there,

rolling around the distant sky.

A dull, clammy day of downpours, 

the lake a soft sheen of grey like a heron's back.

"Are you coming home?

You're not coming home, are you? 

I just need to know."

That day on the beach it seemed the sea knew her heart.
All day she walked, pacing in seething rage at her own weakness.

All of a sudden she had a longing to see him.

She knew then that she would go home in the end.