Widow

Fall 2009

“But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives.”
- 1 Timothy 5:6

I am removed
from everyone who could tell you my name and
I am transparent
to the eyes in the room.
It isn’t that they see through some rough exterior
to the poor hurting thing inside, or that they have a deeper
understanding of me at all.
They just don’t see me.

There are children and men and women, and birds,
all too distracted
by their agendas and terribly mundane lives
to look up at a girl in a brown sweater
who is watching them
intently.

They don’t know that my hair is thinning
or that my father just discarded some marvelous shred of hope.
They would never imagine that
I am contemplating
their actions, because they do not imagine
anything.
They are imagine-less, thinking that they should’ve had
lunch at home, instead of picking up fast food
because they don’t have money to waste
on filler meals.
The man with the waist-length hair doesn’t know
that he’s wearing my friend’s favorite sweater and
the high school boy to my right doesn’t know that I
just listened to one of his favorite songs,
or maybe I didn’t.

None of them know that my whole world
is happening all at once as I sit here,
even though I haven’t spoken a word yet today.
I feel like a Saturday morning suicide that goes
unnoticed ‘til night, or even Monday at nine
when someone sees an empty desk,
and makes a bad joke, not realizing that
poor, bullied soul is no more.
I feel like I wrote a one-hit wonder,
like I am a widowed Mrs. Cellophane.
I took notice of the invisible,
then found myself alone.

The silent boy behind me doesn’t know
that I just saw him looking at my hair, and not
the mountains ahead of us.
It didn’t occur to him that, when he leans into the sun,
his reflection off the window is more
real and vivid than he is.
He doesn’t know that I just realized I am not the
only gazer in this box of silence, and
that in the moment I felt myself in his thoughts,
he changed my view
of life outside this window.

But then, he left, and he didn’t know
that I watched him walk away
or that the words he saw me write
were about—inspired by—him.
He doesn’t know that I am alone,
and that he just shattered me by not
turning, even just to see if I saw his last steps.
I would have. I would have turned.