Mayluna

by Kelley McNeil

The music of our lifetime is woven into the fabric of our existence,

Sometimes you have to do that—take the thing about you that makes you the saddest and learn to spin it into a superpower.

When you spend most of your life hearing that you don’t matter or that you’re a burden, it’s nearly impossible for your nervous system to accept anything but that message. Yet somehow, he began to heal those parts.

There was a history of love and loss in his face that I recognized as if he were a mirror.

No one had ever had the effect on me that he had.

“I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved you back then,”

“It’s always been you, Ev,” he whispered, holding me closer, kissing me. “Always.”

“I compared everyone to you, Ev. To what we’d had, and everyone failed. I couldn’t make myself settle for less.”

I’ve never once seen you look at someone the way you and Carter looked at each other last night.

We’re meant to grow and meant to evolve, and it always seemed to me that people who kept that time of their lives on a pedestal, like a dusty award, never bothered to evolve.

“We’ve always been connected like that,” he said. “Clearly it feels like we never stopped.”

Regardless of space, time, and distance, it’ll be like that for us. She’ll always hear me, and I’ll hear her.

“No matter what happened, no matter what you did or what he did, it was always the two of you. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I know I never will again.”

There is a certain stillness that happens in the aftermath of great loss, when one is given a choice—to travel on in the path of darkness and pain, locked in a sight turned only to the past, or to emerge into the light and celebrate all that has been.

So while I know that he was the love of your life, please know that you have been the love of mine.

We try so hard to be a good example for our kids. But maybe what they really need is to see us as human.

“That plane didn’t take him from me.” Her eyes bore into mine. “You did.”