Roads

My favorite poem for my entire life has been,
Robert Frost’s, The road less traveled.
When you spend as much time as I do alone,
your mind tends to process life events.
Which is why I listen to music most days, loudly.

Lately I have been thinking about those roads.
Where life took me because of each decision I made
along the way.

From leaving home so young.
(Something I can not fathom my own child
being ready for at the age she is right now.)
To leaving Cathy. For a man of all things.

Living alone for so many years until computers
brought me to an on line community where I met
this woman that keeps staring at me daily.

Nine years on the 13th.
I have loved her so completely.
I thought for a long time that this kind of love
would never come my way. I resigned myself to it.
It was enough to have had love.
To have loved others, even if I never said so.
I knew the risk and didn’t want it.

But when she showed up, all reserve seemed
to leave in that moment. Later, I was again afraid
and wanted her to leave. She never did.

I have tested that over these years, not consciously,
I don’t think. I was never one for games. But the tests
were there in the struggles that life throws at you.
She weathered them with me. At times in spite of me.
For us.

We know each others stories, every last one, and we
still think the other is amazing. She is small town.
Innocent in many ways to the larger world around her.
Few cultural events happened there. She was a ball player.
The kind I would have drooled over. From the sidelines of course.
I was a California girl, a reader, a dreamer, I wouldn’t
know how many players are on a team. She loves me anyway.

I catch her watching me even now, and I am alarmed by
it at times. I imagine immediately that there is a problem.
I’ve stepped in something or there is something on my face.
But no, she just watches me with this smile on her face.
Just because.