Distant Observer

photo credit: Frodrig

He watched the family on the mall with a detached joy, a rare bubble of melancholic desire that welled up from someplace within him he’d forgotten existed. He watched as the father placed a hand on the small of his wife’s back, her upturned face smiling and aglow as the children frolicked beneath them, their shrill laughter floating up to the balcony where he stood in silence. He noted the way the gentleman’s head bent to speak to his wife, their conversation hushed and earnest, the way the wife’s smile was for him and him alone. They had fallen into that rhythm he had once known so well, in step with the march only long married couples could hear. Theirs was an easy interaction, punctuated by unaffected expressions of interest and contentment.

Had he stood on that same mall not so long ago, in a world not so very different from this, and been looked down upon by another balcony dweller lost in his own reverie? Had he once, in a moment of unadulterated completion, looked on his wife with eyes that saw only her good? Was there ever a time for him as whole as the moment he now witnessed? And did the man he watched know at all how lucky, how undeservedly, goddamned lucky, he truly was?

He never realized he’d been rubbing the place on his finger where his wedding band used to be.