Randy Come Home

I wrote this in Feb 2019. It was night, the kids had gone to bed and I was alone. I was watching the news and it was the 1 year 'anniversary' of the shooting of 17 children at Stoneman Douglas high school in Florida. My husband Randy was out of town, and I just wanted him to come home.

The snow is wet and heavy on the branches and I see now there is more of it falling. I have posted about love and we’ve texted a few sweet things back and forth. But now I want you home, because the snow falls thickly, and I know both the light and the dark.

I am reading (again) about those 17 children a year ago. I see the unravelling, the unveiling of truth and it is showing not clean white bones holding it all together, but a red-black seething cauldron of god-knows what.

All that I know goes on that I hide from our children with a fierceness that still surprises me. Do they still think it is all about love? That the heart is only the sweetness of chocolate and the softness of a rose petal?

Or do they know what unravels when you look too deeply? I want them to live protected by the softness of the love I feel for them. But they are getting older now, and I can’t hold off the world that is barrelling down on them like a storm offshore.

I know the truth of what the heart is. I know it can break. I know that it mourns and cries for children we don’t know, and can still, years later, shed tears for those we did know and we’ll never get back.

And the ones who are fading fast away from us. Even our dog is getting older and slower. I dream about people and animals walking away from me. Hiding from me, just out of my reach and walking away. I miss you darling. Come home soon.

Let me wrap myself around you. Because night is coming and love and darkness and beauty are swirling around me like a winter storm.